she was the words trapped between bedsheets -
the conversations of past nights, secrets shoved between the pinprick holes in the mattress.
she was the way the bedside table always wobbled on the right leg,
the back and forth motion it made when a cup was balanced on its chest - on it’s thrumming heartbeat -
she was the things my mouth couldn’t say and my mind couldn’t comprehend -
                         the way her heels clicked against the tiles in our kitchen, the chip out of our bathroom counter, the way the sun splayed onto her back in a striped pattern from the blinds - slim and sly, her freckles illuminated in the galaxy speckled lines.

when I met her she was like nothing I’d ever seen before, she was words that got stuck in throats - thick and heavy with worry
-
she was the stumbling, sweet girl who asked me what my favorite color was on our first date, who looked at me as if I painted the colors of the leaves and I changed the seasons with my own fingertips.
when she left I tried to tell my therapist I didn’t think I would ever feel whole again -
I told him how she said it wasn’t her, that she had tried and tried but she didn’t think she could give me enough love to make me love myself - to make me respect myself enough to respect her. -
I told him about the secrets in the mattresses and the way our dresser had a heartbeat, and how everything she said and did was to make me feel like I had a purpose, like I was here for a reason - with her for a reason.
I tried to explain how she was the sound of the sun setting, and then I had to explain how the **** a sunset had a sound but he didn’t understand how everything had a sound when she was there,
              when she loved me everything shone so ******* bright I thought I was going to lose my mind and when she left I thought I was going to ******* die. she kissed me hard that day, and she tasted like the cherry jolly rancher chapstick she had never quite grown out of using -
                      I told my therapist that jolly ranchers make me sick now, and that he said that  maybe I had never liked them he said he had never met somebody who had such obscure symptoms of a heartbreak, but since she left I can’t even taste the artificial cherries without feeling sick.

I’m here again,
in all the intersections she kissed me in -
there hands on the steering wheel, one of them is not mine and she is holding me so tightly -
I don’t know how I got here but I don’t want to leave
I’m on the freeway, seventy-five miles an hour, her fingers between mine - breaking my bones in the sweetest way possible
seventy five miles
we were a part of each other for seventy-five days,
she kisses me hard, my eyes closed
and we surpass eighty
breaking ninety,
my heart is breaking ninety miles an hour
why didn't she love me the way she kissed me,
why couldn't she love me as much as I did, her
why didn't she stay for the way my heart was breaking
I loved her endlessly, I loved her hard
I’m here again,
in her bed -
our words are floating above our heads -
our heads,
who is she here with?
this isn't me she’s kissing,
I pray to the god of out of body experiences but he doesn't pinch me back into a reality
where I am in bed with her again,
this is being chained against the wall as she kisses another man,
this is watching through invisible walls as the one you love, loves another - pretending like you don't exist
do I exist?
please tell me I’m not living if I am not part of this world, part of her world
part of toothpaste kisses before tripping down the stairs to seven a.m city noise, and feeling her fingers touching me, breaking my world into pieces - she broke my world to shards
this is not piecing yourself back together, this is bottle through a stained glass window broken - I cannot pick up these pieces to save my life why won’t she come back
I am here again,
I do not want to be here -
please tell me this is in my head,
please tell me I am not living

she was made of mistakes -
they were drawn on her hips and the tips of her fingers
her skin was always painted white with fear, lips a bruised blue from kissing too many mouths of bottles and swallowing too many words at once-
the softness of her flesh had never been clean, always marked with bruises from her nightly trips down the road, her feet sending her body flying onto concrete where she would inhale rocks and ugly words spit from people's mouths as they passed her -
she was a girl undone, loose ends and shaking hands, a mistake - a tragedy - she was everything a girl should not be yet, she was everything she ever wanted to be.

sometimes I find myself wondering if there really is a method to all the madness; all the pain and the heartbreak and the times we laugh so hard our visions blur. I wonder if everything happening for a reason applies to somebody wrapping their car around a light-post as much as it does two people meeting at the wrong time.