The 101 slopes like a spine bent too long.
Camarillo yawns wide in the morning hush,
valley stretching slow, hills bare-shouldered,
fields glistening, half-asleep, half-prayer.

Lemon trees blink slow, bruised gold in the mist.
Figtrees call a name behind a rusted gate.
Sagebrush whispers gossip through chainlink,
its breath full of stories that outlive the tellers.

To the east, the nursery stirs,
plastic sheeting *****,
row tags flutter in the wind.
A thermos, abandoned, rests by a wheelbarrow.
Mud boots, discarded,
stand like sentinels
against the wood plank wall.
No footsteps follow.
I never asked where they went.

Matilija poppies raise their paper-white heads,
and the raspberries, furred with morning dew,
shiver, just slightly,
as if remembering friends
they were no longer allowed to say.

A coffee roaster hummed somewhere distant,
low and steady, warming the wind.
That scent I never could shake,
burnt and sweet.
I could almost belong here again,
but it’s not mine without them.

I worked inside this valley with my back.
With my knees.
With the same hands,
now soft on the wheel,
muscle memory steering roads
as if nothing ever left,
as if the ghosts still ride along.

I pass a strawberry field, stitched in silence,
no voices rising in laughter today,
no corrido escaping from a shirt pocket radio,
no teasing between the furrows,
no calloused hands tossing tools,
only the soft ticking of irrigation
and the hush of work
that now waits for no one.
This silence has been swept, labeled,
nothing out of place but sadness.

I was here with them,
but only as a pair of eyes,
that never opened wide enough.

The strip mall stands like a broken promise,
painted stucco, faded western wear,
alongside roadside markets
missing the opening crew.
Still, the hills lean in to listen,
velvet green with memory,
quiet as folded hands.

Even now, under this sun,
the dust knows who knelt here.
Who sang into the rows,
who fled before sundown,
their names erased from the ledger
but carved into the earth.

And in soil’s hush,
their names still root and rise.

Now the cuts
have faded to pale seams,
from the girl
who left her key on the counter,
and took the why with her,
and the friend
you hadn’t seen in years
but still called brother,
his last paintings
hanging quiet on walls
in rooms no longer yours.

like the ghost of an old song,
still in key
you rise again
fingernails dark with soil,
burying sunflower seeds
in morning’s cold fog.

The dog needs feeding.
There’s toast to burn,
and leaves to steep.
You carry your small life
like a cracked bowl
that still holds water.

After years bent in ritual hunger,
knees pressed to rock,
tongue dry from vow,
nights lit like altars,
no revelation came.
No divine telegram.
No trumpet of truth,
just the kitchen humming
and the silence after the call.

Only the widow neighbor,
waving through fogged glass.
Only the pipes in the wall
clunking like an old lung.
Only the light
barging in
without your consent.

You believe in coats
with missing buttons,
safety pins where zippers gave,
old threads that never matched
but held anyway.
You forgive the past
not because it asked
but because you need the room.

It builds in your bones
like wind in an empty house,
constant, uninvited,
and full of old names.
Like a tune half-remembered,
only the hum
remains.

god, i'm so sorry
last time was really close
i'm doing better now
i promise

just don't look under my sleeve
and it'll all be okay

i am a porcelain doll
a presentation, a display
if i crack
they'll see my decay

i am an actor
a phony, a fake
i bind my chest
and hope i don't break

i am a marionette
a puppet, a toy
"look at this ***...
he'll never be a real boy."

Tell me about your painting
how it adorns your skin,
call it art,
as your flesh rips apart,
the blood soon sinks in.

Tell me about the constellations,
about the ripples in the waves.
Let my finger trace your arms
gently,
guiding through the stars
as you turn your face away.

Let the night be one,
together we can be as dark as the setting sun.
Let me kiss my lips, to your scars
memories flow jaggedly, afar.

I bite.
Not with teeth.
with silence,
with sharp glances,
with walls built higher than your reach.

I’m not cruel.
I’m just tired
of being kind first
and torn apart second.

You call it attitude.
I call it armor.
Because being soft
never saved me.
It only made the fall hurt more.

So I speak less now.
Agree less.
Trust less.
I pull away before someone has the chance
to walk out first.

It’s not that I don’t want love.
I’ve learned that even “I care about you”
can come with conditions.
Even soft hands
can leave bruises
you can’t see.

I bite
because once,
I didn’t.
And it nearly broke me.

There comes a moment—quiet, unceremonious, unmarked—when the person you loved, the person you tethered your life to, stops being who they were and becomes someone else entirely, someone harder, more distant, a stranger occupying the same body, breathing the same air, wearing the same clothes, but not looking at you the same way, not speaking in that tone that used to pull you in like gravity. And you try, at first, to ignore it, to pretend it’s fatigue or stress or something chemical, something repairable, reversible. You try to will him back into the person you fell in love with. But then you realize he’s gone. Not dead. Just gone. And there's nothing you can do. No apology, no touch, no cry in the middle of the night will resurrect him.
So you mourn. Not the way you mourn the dead. No one sends flowers. No one visits. No one tells you they’re sorry.

Eventually, you accept the most difficult truth: he is still alive, but he is no longer here.
You become fluent in restraint. You learn to keep your sadness contained in respectable proportions. And yet, it spills- into mornings, into coffee spoons, into phone calls you don’t return. You perform functionality, but inside, something is collapsing.
You realize the breaking doesn't stop. It finds new corners of you to shatter. It digs deeper. It makes room for more pain in places you thought had already been hollowed out. And this is when the past starts to rise, not as a memory, but as a presence, thick and heavy and suffocating. You find yourself in that same room—your mother’s room—years ago, where she cried into her pillow as if silence would keep you from hearing, as if the walls weren’t paper-thin, as if children don’t always know.
And now you are her. Crying into the same silence. Except there’s no child on the other side of the door. There’s just you. And the you that once was. The child that never left. The child who learned early that love could vanish without notice. That people could stay and still abandon you. That pain could be inherited like old furniture—passed down, room to room, woman to woman, until no one remembers where it began.
People tell you time heals. They say it with such confidence, as if time were a doctor, a god, a parent. But you know better. You know time doesn’t heal; it accumulates. It stacks the pain until it becomes indistinguishable from the rest of you. Until you forget what it was like to live without the weight of it.
You live inside them. You decorate them. You fold laundry in them. You raise children in them. You tell yourself you are functioning. But really, you're just surviving grief on a loop.
And in your most honest moments, when no one's looking, you admit it—not aloud, not even in writing, but somewhere behind the ribs: you are still that helpless girl. You never stopped being her. You only got taller.

Oh, Mr Darcy,
You truly are
One of my first and longest loves.
Those dark, brooding eyes,
And sparse words did his tongue speak.
I always did hold you up as
My favourite,
But I have come to find out,
not too handsome to tempt me.