do you miss him or do you just miss someone he asks you standing in the horrible light of the kitchen

you pause for longer than should be necessary

(there is nothing shameful in admitting that it is both)

yet still you hold to old lessons, reciting, dragging your finger across the page,

like prayer beads these things that are so impossible to unlearn, that we teach ourselves

I cannot change, I cannot want another, I want to go back, I must always be available

Treating others as you would want to be treated, but never will be

(a consolation prize of perfectionism, of womanhood)

never able to exist in a moment always tumbling down the hill of future fantasy

following things to their (il)logical conclusions in the imagined reality of your mind

one of the scariest things

(excessive time alone with one's thoughts)

I was thinking maybe you wanted to be more independent she says face pixelated by the connection

but I didn't want you to think that I wasn't here for you if you needed me

you smile tight lipped but not taut

forgiveness given with the time with the missing with the familiarity of exchanging words

yet still something kept hidden a pebble at the heart round and smooth and produced by your own body

she sees it but lets you hold it

perhaps this is wisdom perhaps this is fear perhaps this just is

(I know you've thought about it he says to you you think about everything)

You fall asleep with his shirt pressed against your bare chest and though he must recognize it he says nothing

Remembering tiny details like the paintings you made, moments that plead to be remembered:

the curve of his wrist, the arc of his back, he is simple and flawed and you do not love him

but god is it not wonderful to try?

months later it still kills me

(you always did)

some things perhaps are always haunted

will never cease to hold the specter no matter how routine

even before you were truly a tragedy 

you held that tightly to me.

From what are you wanting to be saved?

Deny deny deny on your light I am dependent

But it's not my honor you're defending

A sentiment I understand better now I think

as the lyrics come to me without reaching

the want to be illuminated by an other

so much about you, so little about them

another just a pawn in a game we play with ourselves

(constantly, endlessly)

I wake from dreams of war, of fighting,

of escape canoes. I look her in the eyes and say,

I don't blame you.

(She does not take it well). Endings are never endings as we construe them.

Even if we pull them off they are always stickier than we had imagined,

dig a little too deep, draw blood, landed slightly funny on the ankle.

It is an eternal fight and in the morning light I see again that it is the only one.

That it is the one I am fighting and wishing it were not so

is one of the many ways to lose.

(Perhaps it is not a battle. Perhaps thinking of it in this way is also a trap.)

The key to find the light within oneself, or out in the world, but to trap it within oneself

for it not to lay reflected in the face of another (another painful fragment from yesterday,

words lodged between your ribs, she must integrate what it is she is projecting on him to herself,

that's the only way to stop loving the wrong person) is it wrong to love anyone?

can I love any one? will the stars let me? drowning in existential first world dilemmas that are

at their heart the issues of each beating chest. to make great art must I live great loneliness?

nothing is ever assured and how do we each find our own enough. find and shape and define

and redefine it, painful and necessary as that is. how do we live another day? how do we tell

ourselves, not today darling, today that is too much. today the weight of my mind might drown me

in the ocean of my own thoughts. today I must be simple and rejoice in my simpleness.

delight in the intellectualizing of such a trivial decision. today I must make decisions and not overthink them. 

today I must take at face value that what claims to be, true.