Loose ends.  You are all I ever am.

Jealousy squirts through my narrow veins.  
Effortless sickness plagues my every guess.  
And I wake up, look at my only Self
And dazedness fades hatred as each blanketed flaw thaws to visibility.  

All tasks ask for failure and preparation is an unprecedented burden.  
The hands that cradle the Earth are the same ones that feed me...
only later to shield my eyes from the resultant memories.  

It seems as if every relation from past, present, and futures bleed into each other.
So I stand behind a screen, wanting to look at everything
being kept out.  Too bad it's woven with holes.  Every circumstance bleeds and seeps
through to each other from these openings, seeing me as the middle-ground.  

Now I'm overwhelmed and under-appreciated.  I shall stand still- unsure- until I wash up on shore with everyone's repaid debts buried next to me in the wet sand.  It would be unintelligent to swim out into new territory until the waters calm.

life is good to me, or maybe this soft place is finally letting me heal.
and yet-

I scroll through the photos on my phone,
visions of a life I’m now unsure of-- looking back,
am I the person in those photos? Is that me? Is that us?
the drunken nights and rare, elusive, quiet mornings.

I spent yesterday remembering that night two months ago.
gauging the distance between us now and all the changes in myself since.
I look in the mirror and I’m not sure if what I see is what I am. This aching is like treading water, waiting for the emotions coming in waves to drag me back out to the deep, dark sea.

I’m removed from everything apart from the aching.
all that remains is the aching.
I feel quite small, far away from everything.
I feel low and blurry.

The days melt together and I mark time in the evenings, at dusk, when I’m feeling you in my chest, when my breath is heavy with longing and nostalgia. You are in every thunderstorm, in every flash of electric magic. You are the shadows on my wall. You are my first cigarette and the last swallow of beer. I feel you in the pit of my stomach on good days.
For hours, I’ll forget you. I’ll question the ache, the dazedness. I’ll smoke or laugh or gaze at the sky. Then suddenly, there’s a pull near my heart, a sort of twinge. It’s an emotion bubbling up through my pores, crawling across my scalp. It makes me shiver, hot and cold all at once. All in the same moment. I’ll think your name to myself, my lips soundlessly moving in a pattern memorized in so many moments. The night I met you, you left with another girl. You looked at me before you left, and somehow I knew what you were saying. I’ve known what you’ve been saying the entire time. I chose to engulf that love, to throw myself with all I had into the thorns and caves and ropes of that short month. I still remember the shock of kissing in the daylight. You told me once, with your arms around me and your voice serious in my ear “You deserve someone who ---” and I still think of that so often. I wonder, where would we be now if I hadn’t given up when you first began to push away?