i feel closest to you at night
or as the setting sun lovingly paints
the floor and walls of my house golden.
i think it's because i associate you with the things that feel
like home.
loving you is like the habitual routine of winding down
for sleep after a long day.
warm, laundered sheets.
the drag of heavy eyes and tired feet
and then
relief when they meet the softness of rest.
that state between consciousness and sleep,
a dreamy, floating escape.
when it's just me, you, and the moon,
we all share some unspoken secret of familiarity.
not always a surging storm,
more like a swift, constant river warmed by the sun.
i even trust you with my dreams,
the one part of myself i truly can't control.
what i'm trying to say, my love,
is that loving you is having all
the safe, soft pockets of time tucked away in my heart.
you are all the good in this world
and loving you illuminates it.

i can remember sitting in the living room and
listening to you talk to your mom on the phone.
and i remember laying in the floor by your feet
when you dried your hair.
i didn't understand, then, how you had so much to talk about every time.
i sit on the other side of 7 years and
i understand it now.
i understand it when i look at my phone and
see we have been talking for an hour
about nothing and everything and nothing again.
i still believe everything you say, and take it for fact.
i want to talk it dead with you forever.
just me and you, on the same line.
just me and you

i wish it could be enough.
wish those blue eyes could carry me
across the sea
to places high and low.
the late night streets of Paris
and autumn in Italy.
wish i'd live 160 feet in the air
not
on sand or in wheat fields
or always desperately waiting
for you to come home after months of separation.
wish you'd walk across that graduation stage with me
and not
stomping boots across dirt fields
and palms coated in gunpowder.
i wish i could be content with hours and days apart
and living a simple life
but i just can't ignore that yearning for something greater.
the fish hook in my chest,
pulling and pulling me towards something more.
i wish i could be content with you

The wind whips through my opened windows.
Greedy. Hungry.
Snatching at my hair, my book's pages.
Yearning for something to hold on to permanently.
So,
I let it take my hand.
Suddenly, out the window, over the trees
we become one.
never to be apart again.

i felt 2021 leave
as if i had showed it to the door
and set the lock when it left.
felt the weight leave my chest
as i looked to the sky,
the fireworks bursting over the trees
of another neighborhood.
i could feel the arms of a ghost
wrapped around my shoulders as we watched.
not an echo of the past
but a promise for the future, for 2022.
like lines waiting to be colored in.
usually, when the time comes,
i don’t feel the change.
the years just drift off into
an abandoned corner of my house
to be stumbled upon in
moments of weakness or
desperation to turn back time.
i am glad to have felt this skin shed,
to give me more room to breath.
the truth is, i had nothing left to give.
no days to be written over or lived in again.
like an animal in a trap,
i have torn through sinew and bone
and made it to air.
though feeling the phantom pain
of what i once was,
i have made up my mind
and i have decided to run.
now, we look towards the newness of midnight,
a clock set to zero.
and so it begins
(again)