We Can't Lose What We Chose to Leave Behind

I think I'll call our marriage:

Disassociating Through

Dissolution and

Other Mental Illness.

I wrapped your birthday presents

the day after asking you for a divorce

I wondered where the tape was,

I wondered how to keep my life intact.

I'm thinking about time folded and creased

neatly presented—

a gift you can give,

but can never take back.

Or maybe:

Losing the Fight

For a Life

of Stillness

The other day I heard that

someone jumped

from a hotel downtown

and I wondered if it was you—

but not enough to call and ask,

not enough to actually

see anything

through.

Or maybe: How Did

You Sleep

Last Night?

You said:

I don't want to end up

as another thing you have lost

I said: to lose is to witness

but to relinquish is to see

Neither one of us knew

exactly what it meant—

I'm not sure if I ever saw you

but I know that you never saw me

Or maybe: The Things We

Lost in the Fire

After I Set Everything

Alight

Sometimes it feels

as if I am hacking

at the seams

with a dull knife

trying desperately to

set something free

and then I remember you accusing me

of trying to take my life

and I think,

no no no, it's:

We Can't Lose

What We Intentionally

Misplace

it's:

All the Things

We Couldn't See

Through

it's:

It All Ends in Any Case

it's:

It's Not Me and

I Know Now for Certain

That it's Not You

Highway Robbery

I read about science

and just end up feeling closer

to God:

who could have done all of this

and why would they have wanted to?

Will I die in a car crash,

too?

That's what I'm thinking

every time we drive on freeways

just to get to other freeways

all of the flares

lining the lanes

like tea light candles

burning and worshiping

at the altar

of movement.

There is this place on

the 134 where at night

you can see out over the entire valley—

it looks like the sky

has been turned into an upside-down bowl

and all the lights are like stars

illuminating the murky

leaden waters

of my brain

while the entire city

unfolds around me but

always keeps itself

slightly out of reach

as I tuck myself into

the unknowable and

obscure,

I dream of the foothills

and the mountains with

their snow-covered caps,

the trees making tunnels out

of ordinary streets

how

I want to understand it all

but the road just

opens

and opens

and opens

and one day,

I wonder if it will take

me with it

I wonder if it will take

me

to wherever it took

you

when it stole you away

from me

The Stars are Projectors

I think a part of me died with you.

Or, a version of me. Like up until that moment I was one person and then afterwards every cell in my body had been replaced by someone I didn't recognize. Someone I'm still unsure of, even all of these years later.

I think about how delicate it felt to love you. So delicate that something always felt just on the cusp of breaking. What would have been if I had loved you more, and sooner? If I had loved you more, and harder? What would it have been like then? Was there a different timeline where I could have changed things? Where I could have saved you?

It's unknowable. The universe keeps expanding and contracting on itself and I am left here, wondering.

I hope there are a million different timelines where I'm somewhere with you, laughing until my sides hurt. Or other ones where I convinced you to stay. Or other ones where you got to live. Or other ones still where maybe you feel proud of me. Other ones where that delicate thing never had to actually break. It never had to bend and twist into grief so absolute that it made me unrecognizable to myself. Other ones where I'm still the me who was figuring out how to love you.

In this one, I love you without hesitation, without fear of it all going wrong. I love you wholly, completely, and I find myself in there somewhere, too, unknowable still but I'm trying. In some silly way, it feels like I am still trying for you.

What Stays for Seven Years & What Disappears?

1.

Collapsing in on myself like a dying star.

The hole left by your absence:

fucked up, permanent, never-ending.

2.

The loss of your youth

lodged in the back of my throat

like a moth encased in amber:

How strange to be forever twenty-four

to fixate on a place in time,

to be trapped there,

to be a static point,

how nice it is too, then, to never

disappoint, to

remain unchanged,

cut short, kept clean,

dust in the wind

blown all through time and space,

the baby,

always the baby,

never having to grow up.

3.

Your last text message is still on my phone,

seven years unanswered.

4.

Shared blood,

shared meaning,

shared space

until there wasn't.

You're still my favorite part of me.

5.

I dream of the woman in San Fransisco

with your heart,

I want to put my head to her chest,

I want to tell her how soft

and loyal and funny

yours was.

6.

Fourteen days from twenty-five,

time eats itself slowly and some

days

it feels like I will be losing

fragments of you,

forever.

7.

What stays

and

what disappears?

Fourteen days from twenty-five,

right when life was opening

up

like a desert bloom unfurled

after a long needed rain:

The last time I heard your voice

I was in Surf Ride in Carlsbad Village,

you called me on the phone, I

walked around touching soft things, listening

to you tell me you couldn't come

to my graduation, but you'd

make it up to me somehow.

What

stays

and

what

disappears:

The last time I saw you

we ate dinner together, we stayed out

late, we laughed on a street corner,

we stole puffs from a vape, we

talked about the future like it

would come clean, like

it wasn't a question, like we knew

what it meant, like discovery

was still possible, like anything

was still possible, like

we could change things, like

we could figure them out,

like there would be space,

like there would be time,

if only the rain would come, if

only things could bloom,

if only time

kept moving.

I stayed

and you disappeared

but sometimes it feels like

the opposite, sometimes

it still feels like I'm the

one disappearing,

like the hole you made when you

left

is

going to

swallow me up.

Here Is

Here is where

the high desert meets the long valley

where

the sun sinks into the fat of the yellow marrow

where

the blood cells replace the blood cells

in an endless loop of time

and an endless loop of life

and an endless loop of death

where

your absence is still noticed

as it wakes me from a deep sleep

where

the memory of your life still creates a soft

and bottomless canyon

in the chambers of my heart

where

the light still escapes

through the tiny holes you created

Here is where

I keep you.

We Are Not What We Think

I study my face in the mirror:

the lines like throughways

leading back to the places

where you & I

converge

I travel them wearily,

studying the landscape

for directional cues

to the places of myself

that come from you

The dust on the road settles like sediment

in the chambers of my heart,

where you’re buried so deep

you have turned to stone and

I try to dig you out

just to figure out

if it’s possible to change

what started everything,

if it’s possible to erode

the space you take up in my life,

there is so much grief inside of me now

that I don’t think any more could fit

so please don’t die

because even though you are already

dead to me

I can’t possibly stand

to lose anything else

If you’re a monster now

what

does

that

make

me?

I study my face in the mirror

wondering how much of you

is still inside of me

wondering which parts

belong to you

can it just be

the good ones?

When I think back on it all,

the only happy memories I have

are with you

but I don’t know if I can have them still

I don’t know if they still belong to me

I don’t know if they are allowed

like:

the time we camped for three weeks

at the base of the Sierras,

how we dug out a home amongst the firs,

how I had never known air that clean

or quiet that flat—

stretching out as far as the needles would lay,

I

watched her lay our clothes out on rocks

to dry in the sun, I

felt so close to you then,

in the depths of the alpine lake

looming love

above the totality

of the horizon

If you’re a monster now

were you always?

If you’re a monster now

weren’t you always?

If you’re a monster now

what does that make me?

If you’re a monster now

why

did you

make me?

California

I travel the topography of California.

Each landmark, a cemetery.

Each monument, a headstone.

Each turning point, a ghost.

If memory is finite,

then every time I move

across these roads,

I am stealing something

from myself.

Or we are thieves,

continuously

stealing something

from each other.

------

I.

Beyond the Jeffrey pines,

where the mountain stretches up

to the sky.

You would find me along the river,

burrowed in the basin.

You would find me along the lake,

buried in the snow.

Once, you drove for days

caught in a storm that I crafted

with my own hands.

Even though you made it through

to the other side,

you could never save me

from myself.

You could never save me

from my own mind.

II.

Nestled in the rolling hills

of wheat,

the place where language was made up once.

How your skin would turn the color

of honey in the sun.

How you told me that this stretch

of highway would always remind you of me.

Does it still?

III.

You were of the sea

but I always hated the beach.

We never talked about love

because you would have never

been able to hear it.

The sound of the waves

drowned out everything

as they crashed against the

bluffs of your fragile mind.

Your pain as big as the ocean,

coming and going like the tide.

Until you receded so far

away from me that the

water never brought you back in.

How I hope that you are still alive.

IV.

Out amongst the tallest trees on earth,

your eyes covered me like moss

that blanketed the forest floor.

The vastness of the redwood grove

as spacious as all the miles

we thought we could bridge.

Your love like a fog that

descended into the trees and

obscured everything for a second,

a mist so fine you aren't sure if you

can really feel it,

until it is finally lifted

by the light.

V.

In the east,

the desert wind

sings your name.

Out in the long valley,

the air dries out our minds

but the blood still pools in our

hearts,

each long road begins

and ends

in our hands

held gently atop my thigh.

--------

Six Years / Lake Tahoe

Time is a thief and it’s stealing you away from me

Sometimes I imagine the long, curved winding roads up the mountain to dad’s house. The cold air that sunk right down into your bones, so clean that it made your lungs hurt. The smell of the pine and fur trees, how they towered over the road and were all you could see in any direction for miles and miles.

I remember once when we were kids, we sat in the back of dad’s 4runner, after he had cut the roof out and opened the entire backseat to the wind, as he drove up the mountain in the dark. He kept trying to scare us by turning his headlights on and off, as he would go around curves in the pitch black, laughing and taunting us. But there was a meteor shower and it looked and felt like the stars were raining down on top of us, both of us with our hair whipping around, the whole sky filled with shooting stars. We were laughing and screaming but we were not afraid. I felt so alive. I felt like nothing could scare us then.

That place I kept like a secret — my second home — lived and breathed inside of me. The horses across the field that rose at dawn, the river that ran back behind the house, the sound of our feet crunching through wet snow. Getting up in the dark to go to work with dad, how he’d give me sweet coffee in a thermos, and turn the heater in his single cab truck so high that it felt like suffocating.

How everything felt slower there, like time did not work in the same way, like everything was perpetually years behind everywhere else and standing still.

I loved it so much there that even thinking of it makes me want to cry. It was one of my favorite places and it felt like it belonged to me somehow.

Until the roads that we watched the stars from, the pine trees, the firs, the mountain we had grown up on — until it took your life, until it stole you away from me. Until it took everything. The place I loved so much would take the person I loved so much and become a memory that is too painful to revisit, a place lost unto time, a ghost living and breathing inside of me. The pines continue to grow like nothing ever happened. The snow and the horses, the river grass bending in the wind, the sun as it dips behind the mountain — lost to the world like you were lost to the world and I still can’t reconcile it.

After we took you off life support, me and your girlfriend stood near the river’s edge and she told me that she could see you in me, she told me that you had loved me the most. I cried and threw rocks into the river, smoked a cigarette, saw sunspots and shadows when I closed my eyes as the late sunlight flooded through the trees.

I couldn’t find my voice for months after you had gone, I didn’t even reply to her. But I loved you the most, too. I still do, I still do.

I miss you, and the trees, and the calm shore of the lake. I miss the places where time stopped moving. I miss the life I kept like a secret that still had you inside of it.

I miss you, most of all, more than anything.

You Will Take Up Space in My Heart Forever

whoever told us that being alive was easy

lied to us

i like to think that

you saved my life

or at the very least

taught me how to use my hands

and if i learned how to look

where to find my voice

and together we discovered poetry

moving inside of us

an unrecognizable force

aching to be freed

and on our best days,

we could write sonnets to our

ethereal freedom

and on your worst days,

we could find the line breaks

in the scars up and down your arms

all the tiny and powerful odes to

how frightening it felt

to be figuring it all out

and

how powerful it was

to be salvaging our youth

from the small fragments

we mined from the wreckage

and when i couldn't bare

to go home anymore

you made me a bed

on your bedroom floor

and for far too long

you were the only person

who would have noticed

if i was gone

if my life was a poem,

you would live

in the space between the words

in all of the places where

i didn't say what i meant

but

i still hope someone heard it

ocean side

i started writing poetry when i was

twelve years

old

my sister only ate apples then,

big, round fuji apples

with colorful & shiny skin

the sounds of the knife

on the cutting board

as she cut through

their heavy flesh

the same

crisp & cold sounds

of her slowly

disappearing

the same

sharp & absolute sounds

of losing her

while she stood right there

in front of me

me, a shy kid

& her

my only true friend

refuge shifting

like a tide

which comes in only

to drag everything

back out to the sea

and she was going:

softly being eaten alive

by a fear of food

or a sense of control

or a desire to

recede back inside of herself

she was lost to

a thousand things

that my small mind

could never understand

and our childhood home stood

on the shore

of her illness

with all of the light sucked out of it

like in the moments before a storm

when everything is dark & still

my mom constantly screaming at her

to get on the scale,

to gain five pounds,

to eat something

all her ways of saying

to get somewhere safe

to stop playing around

to get inside now

to stop this

but i couldn't move

so instead i took refuge

on the page,

crafted a rescue boat

line break by

line break

learned to swim in

metaphors,

long before psych wards

& in-patient treatment centers

long before self-help books

& therapy

i started writing

to find a place where things

still made sense,

just doing my best to weather

the storm.