Before You Knew You'd Know Me.

and finally wake, rise from
9 days of fever dreams.

Sometimes for just a little while you’ll remember what it used to feel like to be you. Don’t think about it too hard or for too long, the sad wants that to happen. The heavies want that to happen. The you that used to feel good is still under there. You are layers of stratified emotion. You can’t dig through this scar tissue. You’ll just make a bloody mess. Sometimes that you throbs beneath this cracked new self the way you feel something from far away; familiar and muted, like running your fingertips over your open palm after you dip your hand in glue.

feel heaviness lifted
from shallow bird breaths,

This feeling will not be your best friend reading to you while you fall asleep in her bed. It’s not your best friend at all. You haven’t heard from her in months, and even that ache has become less familiar than your new lonely. But you have a new friend who wants to take you bow-tie shopping. She says you give the best hugs. And there is a girl that you worry about when the weather is bad or when the mood is dark or when the whole fucking world feels wobbly because you don’t want her to hurt.

the chest expanding 
deeper and deeper and deeper.

You are the best at causing hurt. But you can’t seem to stay away from her bed or her couch or her skin. Her skin. There are lines where she grew into herself, immense root systems. Sometimes they are irrigation lines. She carved herself deep wells, attempting to grow. You are learning her body with all your parts, nibbling absently on a shoulder, her neck. You want to fossilize the indent of your teeth in the clay of her breast, but the impressions are never permanent. Press your ear to the open embrace of her pelvis like you could hear the ocean in there.

shake the dust from your tongue,
bathe your bones in restoration.

She took you to the ocean once. The sky was trying to be spring but the water was slate. You kept your shoes on. You were still strangers then and shy. She hid behind the black box and you made yourself invisible. Drawn into yourself, you pretended to have big thoughts because maybe she would ask you about them. What would you have said if she had asked?

Driving home, Orion spent two hours toppling backwards through space while the tires hummed and the streets were streets that never learned straight lines. There was snow in the rest stop parking lot.  Or maybe there wasn’t, maybe that’s a memory from a long time ago. Back when snow still knew how to make walls between you and reality.

let honey drizzle across 
the inflamed lung tissue,

When she told you the worst parts you held her hand. You hoped it was enough because it was all you had. It is still all you have. 

let sunshine shatter the impervious
sheen of pallid winter skin. you
are not a ghost anymore.

That’s enough.