this is a habit that I know I must stop,
inhaling and exhaling the fumes around the clock.
but I couldn’t really help it because,
it’s the only way I could think of doing
to somehow feel your presence back.

This is an apology to my younger self
for letting her forget the ixora bracelets
tucked in her tattered notebooks;
for letting her blur the outline of Artemis’ body
resting the edges of a waxing moon.
This is an apology for the poetry
and the songs she tuned out
that could’ve saved her life.
This is an apology for allowing her
to stop hearing the midnight stories
of the souls who get lost in unknown towns
concealed beyond
the gaps in their ribs;
for allowing her to stray too far
from mountain-and-sea sunsets
that she can no longer smell
the salty air
and remember the color
of the twilight skies.

This is an apology for allowing her to fall out of love
with the things she wanted
to stay in love with —
for allowing her to fall out of love
with the things that kept her alive.

This is an apology —
for peeling the tattoo scabs
between the drags on a cigarette,
for sleeping drunk on a pile of ***** laundry,
for wanting to keep
the dreamers in the rye,
and yet falling off the cliff
two pages before the ending.
This is an apology for writing her dreams
in a bottle and throwing it out
into the open ocean;
now those dreams
are nautical miles away,
lost in the domes
of a sunken city.

This is an apology to my younger self
for all the things she wanted to be
that I never became —
and an apology
for all the things I am
that she never wanted to be.

And yet, this too is a promise to her
that it’s okay:
it’s okay to lose yourself
in places you don’t like.
It’s okay to wake up and find yourself
confined in a body
you no longer seem to know.
It’s okay, darling;
someday, you’ll find your way back.

I’ll find my way back.

We’ll find our way back
to who we’re supposed to be.

And it’ll be home.