You said your life would be lonelier without me.
So tell me,
Are you lonely now?
Or have you replaced me with someone else

i always dreamed about this —
meeting you again
in our favorite bookstore
and buying our usual authors
and paper cuts on ****** novels
just like the old times,
before the words all
fell out of the books.

i always dreamed about this —
neck kisses and i love yous
in a yard we’d call our own,
while the playlists we made
echo from earphones
in the grass.

i always dreamed about this —
listening to you recite poems
under the sky and the meteor showers;
then again darling, every prose you say
is my spoken poetry —
is my love sonnet written
for matilde urrutia.

i always dreamed about this —
getting lost once more
in the space between your freckles
and in the outline of your lips
and in the scent of your cologne
mixed with the sunset petrichor.

i always dreamed about this —
about this very moment of seeing you again,
in mundane places
and maybe years later,
dreams could come true
somewhere in grocery aisles
and casual talks;
except in my dreams:

you’re not wearing a wedding band.
you’re not lost
in the way that he smiled.

in my dreams,
i’d be the one opening the doors
and carrying the grocery bags,
and you would not walk away
and leave so soon
while smiling back at him, darling
and while holding his hand.

in my dreams,
i’d still be the one saying i love you.
i love you.
i love you.

and you would still
say it back.

and there are still weekend mornings
when your absence is twice as heavy
to be written on my thickest notebook sheets,

and there are still weekday mornings
when i mistake someone else’s phone call
for yours,
and that the empty space in bed
looks just like the days
when you would get up to greet the sun

and there are still mornings
when it feels like
we’re just movie-dates and serenades
away from making up
and from breaking each other’s hearts again
only to call it love

but

your name is now
someone else’s synonym
for morning coffees and unmade beds
and arrows for a wrist tattoo.

and darling, i still bleed
from the paper cuts
and the last ten poems
i wrote for you.