You plant a dead seed in the Winter
And tell a child to wait for Spring.

I am afraid that if I dare speak to you again there will no more be any words to say.
If we were to speak in another language and find a way to express this void,
Our hearts would explode from its sheer, bleach-stark truth.

There are not even any left to mean ‘I love you,’
but ‘I’ and ‘miss’ and ‘you,’
Promptly engraved on your organs by that gaping hole in your stomach,
The lingering taste of skin on your lips,
The thin sheet of sweat in your nostrils,
The disappearing bite marks along the curvature of your spine.

(The more distance sound has to cover, the less likely it will reach its destination.
There are no Grand Canyons in the Pacific Ocean, and words do not reverberate across clear skies.)

Every night, ‘You’ and ‘Miss’ and ‘Me’ form tentative droplets of water
They make their way down my neck,
Rest on the nest of my clavicle,
and stay there, stagnant, until morning.
(You were always a body of water to me.)

My stomach is gradually healing itself.
The stitches formed by the words
“Might’ and ‘Not’ and ‘Feel’ and ‘(the) Same’ are the most painful.

A RE-CYCLED boyfriend, with love like new
a re-cycled superhero fell from
re-cycled bedtime stories and re-cycled songs.
(I once sat next to an ex-lover on the train.)
On re-cycled cab seats and
second-hand dreams, to second-rate alibis
using re-cycled, bated, breathing breath,
the smell of re-cycled furniture
the musk, the dust
the re-cycled mother,
some second-hand toys for orphans of re-cycled mothers,
their re-cycled apartments touched by
re-cycled hands that hold
orphans and the world that is full of these things,
these unwanted things.
(No matter where you sit, it’ll always be next to an ex-lover.)
So we re-cycle, and then we’re like new again.

It is impossible to be in two places at any given instance.

An example: I live in the little house on Valley Road. All my possessions are in my room on Lancewood Street. I live with my (chosen) family. My relatives are related to each other, as they also happen to be related to me.  The love of my life exhales, soundless against my neck, while I inhale the memories of a homeless Californian who found home with me.
I am awake yet I am not dreaming.

Observe: if you cut yourself up and entrust these pieces to the farthest corners of the universe, only one of the following can happen:
     1. You could stay just outside and encompass the whole universe along its perimeter (e.g. she encompasses the universe);
     2. You are just you still, and is within and inside the universe (e.g. she is among the stars in the universe);
     3. Your pieces will no longer be different from floating debris, ‘these’ are x number of pieces, and these pieces cease to carry your identity (e.g. ‘they’ (not she) are scattered far apart).

One cannot be all of these at once.

My heart belongs to one. It yearns for another. It believes in the one. It knows of no other happiness but with the other. I want to go, I want to stay. Distance is only too relative, yet both are, regardless, so far.

Could I blame him? He asked me to sing his favorite John Mayer song. Then the curtains fell from their state of grace, but there wasn’t any need to hang them until we finished; by then the windows had all fogged up. I didn’t know the lyrics to the song, so instead he had me struggling for the words to say. Because when the body struggles under another body’s weight, words become incoherent, obsolete, and syllables become the only words you need. Bated, gasping, ugh, unh, oohh. Our, he, his, my, I. I had invited him to our house. I laid him on our bed. He took his shoes off of his own accord, because to his (mis)understanding, it was my house.

I dream about them sometimes.

A fold for an eyelash, crooked tooth, white hair;
A beak for a fingertip, heart-shaped mole, rough elbow;
A wing for an expression, idea, stifled laugh;
A neck for a spasm, brutally honest letter, sleeping breath.

I hold tightly to my chest the first of the two paper cranes [Loss and Love, respectively]. It calls back to her brothers and sisters at (our) home. At times, the sound would be so painful, I would banish it to the farthest recesses of my room, between book and shirt, away from light and butterflies.
But her cage is an illusion.
Paper is as fragile as the heart, and the older it gets the more brittle it becomes. Then, she would fit nicely through the bars.

One tiny (paper) tear for a missed celebration, stifled sob, empty rib cage.
I can see them all now, simply by knowing how long this one waited for them to come.
Their destination is an illusion. You could scatter them across the sea and they would all find refuge at the bottom of our ocean.

I still fold to this day, and wonder if you still do, too.

There are days when he mentions your name. I take it like a sugar pill — a little too sweet; becomes a coating of whateveritis on my tongue not long after; on my teeth, the grinding; what am I saying — I am no longer able to taste anything; maybe it’s better this way.
- There are days he says it might make me happy to be with you instead, it being easier. He is 7,307 mi away, and there are a million and one places you and I could ‘accidentally’ meet in this city. Today, I agreed with him, that it might be easier, but not for that reason.
- There are days when I wish he would stop being in my conscious so that I can remember memories from before him more clearly. I want him too much, so my mind focuses on the memories I share with him more. I have no energy left for anything else. I can’t remember what came before him and I can’t picture life after him.
- I became too confident that I have mastered the few concepts on life we so arduously pored over together; I have forgotten how to state them in words.
- There used to be a time when I couldn’t picture life without you too. I make too many drafts now, and edit posts after publishing [kudos to Adam Jones].
- I wish you didn’t let me give you up so easily. Then again, maybe I shouldn’t have been honest and clear about my intentions so there would be room enough for you to guess.
- I still can’t picture life without you.
- But you leave too quickly, I don’t know if this means anything to you. If I mean anything to you.
- I am still waiting for you to come back.
- Come back.