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.
