I thought about you today. There's not much left there for me after 3 years, but sitting in a brief silence and glancing about the space around me, I found that a piece of you resurfaced and lingered for a few moments before sinking back down into the crevices of my mind. You're truly gone, and I'm nothing like I used to be. Everything changes. There isn't a thing that doesn't come to pass.

You're everywhere
Like toffee in my teeth,
Like wine staining white
like moss overgrown.
You're everywhere, like the stench of old *** in a wooden outhouse
Like ants on a countertop
like toothpaste when I brush my teeth.
You're everywhere, like the contents of a stomach spattered across a dashboard
like the stern voice in my head
like crumbs in bed
everywhere
like damp hair on a pillow
like smoke in a burning room
like pieces of something broken on the floor.

I suggested that we consider a world without the other, and put away these thoughts of Goodbye for good if that world looked harrowing enough.
You finished too soon and went inside for a nap, away from the sun.
On your list you'd written down a few kind things, and scratched out a thought mid-sentence.
Mine was three pages long.
"If you were to go...", it began

You took your suitcase with you when I told you goodbye, and I think now of how much we argued over how it had never been unpacked.
You wore the same skin from that autumn night on my birthday, till the last breaths of winter had passed from my bedroom.
What do your garments look like?
Even as you are, you're forever changing in my eyes and that is my gift to you: new clothes, fresh from a calm wind on that drooping line and ironed by the sun.

You weren't answering any
of my calls, so I made one more and let a stranger drive me around on
quiet, damp roads in the pitter-patter of the rain you said wouldn't come.

I took him to the very edge of love and then left him that night without even a touch, because he'd have dived in (eyes shut) if he had felt how hot my skin was.

I read today that most boomerangs aren't meant to come back.
They're thrown and should fly precisely to where the thrower intended, preferably away.
Boomerangs were born bent and angled, deformed with one wing shorter than the other, or longer than the other and more brazen.
While in motion, these wings stay at war with each other as though they were not two parts of the same whole;
A constant quarrel, brought on not by being discarded to the haphazard whim of the calm or anxious air, but by the indecision of which way to go when cast off from a home.
In the end, it's the indecision that returns them, as it's difficult to keep going when you're not sure of which way you're going.
When this is the case, back is where you're propelled, whether you're wanted there or not.
And you're either welcomed by a pair of grateful hands, or (like today) left feeling around in the ground trying to get your bearings.

Yesterday you shot paragons of (...) out of the sky
like little birds
for fear that they would salvage a home from our coarse touches and cool words
This sharp light tastes nothing of you
You were once the sentimental sort:
erecting chairs outside,
in the name of fresh air.
Now, out in the open, it would be too easy to tell us apart
We are butter and clay in the sun
Oh yes, this light tastes nothing like you
I stayed true, and you swallowed the birds whole