"everyone's trying to hold me," you say. "everyone's trying to hold me down." you're scratching at your skin like it's a layer that can be shed off. you're clutching at anything that moves, and your eyes are open but you don't see... you don't see anything. you're scaring me.
there, i've said it, finally. you scare me.

but it's only in that short bit of time where it's morning but it still feels like it's night that i allow myself to think. so when i fall asleep, it's not because of exhaustion, but simply because my eyes are too sore to stay open. the lights are on. and they'll be on in the morning, and i'll leave them on throughout the day because i'm still afraid of the dark -
even when it's light out.

your skin is icing over. we're crawling out of our frames, leaving our bodies behind without minds or faces. we've broken bridges, so we can never come back. stand back. i don't want you near me.
i don't want you to be the only thing that's left.

i talk to
you every day.
in my head i tell you
how i feel. in real life we
talk about poems and how our
days have been. i tell you how i went
to the cafe down the street and bought a
coffee and a piece of cheesecake. i should tell
you. i'm less everyday. you chip away at me. you
think you will find heaven inside of me but there is no
heaven inside of me there is only more of me and i'm sorry
for that. it's been two weeks and i already think about
the lines on your palms and if you get wrinkles
by your eyes when you smile. two weeks.
the lines on your palms. wrinkles by
your eyes when you smile.
your eyelashes. if you
have any scars.
i'm chipping away,
away, away. i drink the coffee.
i bring the cheesecake home and it
stays in the fridge for two weeks. everytime
i look at it i feel guilty for not telling you how much
i care. i don't know if i feel guilty because you make me
feel less lonely or if i actually love you. i want you like
i want the books my mother threw away without
telling me. it still feels like that. i know i should
tell you. i know, i know, i know. but i know
you're going to leave without telling me.
without leaving a note and you
won't take your keys or
your wallet or
anything.

jesus christ i am falling for someone who will never love
me back. I'll put my heart in his hands and clutch my
chest as he tears it into little pieces. fragments. he's
gonna reach into my ribcage and snap every bone
in half. when he kisses me, he will bite my
tongue till I bleed and beg him to stop.
everybody is terrified of pain but
you need that pain because of
those nights when you sit
on your bedroom floor
convinced that you
are dead
and
you are
numb and there's nothing
inside you. texts from him will
make you cry and picturing kissing his
lips, soft, slowly, will make you scream and
it'll hurt like hell but **** at least you'll feel something.

I no longer like living by myself, and that is your fault, because you're not here to be grumpy in the mornings. every day I could turn to my right and find you, nudge my way onto your chest, and you would kiss the top of my head with your eyes still closed. one good thing about alberta is that the mountains are beautiful there, mountains that always made me want to go faster, run faster, climb, but lying there with you, watching the sun make shapes on the bed, felt the same as being thirty thousand feet up high, where the air is thinner.

I was always taking mental pictures of my legs wrapped around you. you would sing tom waits and britney spears within the same hour. I got mad because you didn't kiss me right when people were around. you were so proud when you remembered what kind of tea I like in the morning. I finally figured out how to take off your belt with fumbling hands, and anytime the cat was around, you would pick her up and put her in my lap.

sometimes we held each other  in front of mirrors, as if to see what home looks like, and I would think to myself, remember this, always remember this.

passports and suitcases always make me nervous, now.

when you walked out of the airport I watched you go, and I was shaking. I understood when you said that it's all okay, that we've done this before, but I wasn't ready to do anything but stay. I took off my jacket and my shoes and I placed everything I had in little white bins, and I kept my head down and didn't look at anyone, but I'm sure every person who saw me knew that I had left behind someone I loved that day.

i am more
than the mistakes
i have made

but i will regret
how easily
i gave my heart away

it's as if we are children again, and I am lying perfectly still, playing dead, waiting for the tap of sticky fingers on the back of my hand so I can stop pretending. it's hard to stay static for so long, even if you are making a home for when I visit, even if you are setting out two plates, two pillows every night, even if I am the river and you are the bank, it makes no difference if I am not enough to flood you over.

I would will new ground to walk on if that is what's keeping me away. I would train my tongue to never form the word goodbye. I would get a proper haircut, I would gain some perspective, I would learn japanese, if all those things meant growing up and growing up meant getting up on crooked knees to run with you.

when I write, I think about the things I will never feel again, like stepping out of my bedroom to my mother resting her head on my stepfather’s shoulder, quiet, in the hallway, or how I almost lost my virginity at three o’clock in the afternoon to a boy with skin smooth and pale as seashells clawed open, or having the future be only illustrated in tomorrows, or seeing the indian ocean for the first time, and having it be nowhere near as bright in the stories I had been told.

and if I had made up all those memories who is to say that they’re not real? if a single sentence can take me along coastlines and through waters, who is to say that I cannot make my body the sail, and with the wind filling it, continue long after the place where memory ends and absence begins? if I, perhaps, disappeared on the 19th of february, who is to say, on paper, that it is not the 19th of february that disappeared instead?

I’m going to fall backwards onto a cliché and let it carry me. I’m going to dictate, a monologue of boring, badly put confessions. I’m going to tell you that your eyes sweep me up in a hurricane of mixed-up pleasures. I’m going to tell you that when I wake up and see you lying beside me, I have to turn away because I forget that I’m living my own life, and not some picturesque movie version of it. I could get up and brush my teeth and get dressed and drink my coffee and still not believe it. I’m going to tell you a lot of things, all about me and all about you, and you might get bored and yawn and rub your eyes but in the end I hope you’ll understand.

I hope you’ll understand that those three words that are so unforgiving and so overused can be the most important ones at the right time. I could write about flowers and skies and models and kittens. I could write about something that’s not you. but you smell like flowers and your eyes are the color of the skies and none of the models are as beautiful as you and you’re allergic to kittens so I’m confused and I’m embarrassed and I’m sorry that you’re all I think about.