the ocean blue ring of your irises and sleepy eyelids. the prominent hollow between your shoulder blades. the bare strip of stomach revealed when you yawn and stretch your arms above your head. the pale place behind your ears, sensitive to my lips. the skin of your neck always bruised with love. your hands with their long fingers and short nails so boyish and cute. the curves of the backs of your knees where your calf turns into your thigh. skin and blood and bones and breaths.
the places i reach over to touch when i wake up at four a.m. and realise that the other half of my bed is empty with a shape that only you can and will not fill.

drunk text me. text me when the music is loud and there are girls dancing around you and you’re not quite coherent and you’re not quite yourself. drunk text me that you love me or that you miss me or that i’m on your mind. let the alcohol tell me all the things you won’t say sober.

you rid yourself of my company years ago, but i still long to know how you are doing and if you have someone to keep the other half of the bed warm - but most of all, i wonder if my name ever crosses your mind, for yours never left mine.

i write poetry on the back of street signs that read ‘one way only’.

the walls of your bedroom hold the american flag and photographs - none of me, i am too new in your life - and smells of girlfriends past and hours of quiet bedtime whispers and loud nighttime fights. i don’t ever want the sound of my screaming to be locked in this room of yours, we are not permanent but we are not unkind.
i look at you now and the lines of your shoulder blades that i’ve spent the last two weeks and not a day more tracing. we seem okay for now, but this summer will end and i will go back to college where there will be too many pretty boys down the hall tempting me with gentle bumps of their hips and longing glances.
we don’t have to think about goodbye yet, though. we still have tonight to get through.

i have a map of places i can’t go without thinking of you. from the park to the waterfall, to the ******* halls of that ******* high school, even the roads when I’m driving late at night because you made it a habit for me that i can’t even begin to break. these places pinpoint in my mind, glowing stars all individual until they join up to make the constellation that was us.
i live in a ghost town and i want out.

i see the rain dancing across the windowpane as we sit in a small cottage kitchen. a game of scrabble sits before us and tea was never our strong suit so even though we are twenty-eight and still growing up now, we fiddle with our mugs of hot chocolate to keep our hands from shaking.
the blanket around my shoulders reminds me of when we were just kids, seventeen and stupid, curled in your bed. i kept it after all this time in the hopes that i will be able to get your scent back. when i saw you and we hugged and i invited you here, my whole body shivered with desire because the tantalising taste of cinnamon was still there on your skin. i wanted to kiss you like mad on that chilling, teeth-chattering cold street, but as i tried to warm your fingers in mine i told you i had a boyfriend.
this is where we sit, reminiscing in his kitchen while he is out working, and i wonder if i’ll make you leave before he comes home, or if we’ll both leave and be halfway across the country before he realises i have packed up everything i own and my car is no longer in the driveway.
when i close my eyes and think of england i think of that chance i never took.