I cannot sleep at night while you're gasping for air,
laying your heavy body upon an equation
that's crushed together
to form a single thread of mathematics.
Do you remember?
I used to say that about the roads from here to there.
Here to there, here to there.
It was all so simple then.
It was all so simple through telephone wires.
It was all so simple into a receiver.
We were so simple when we would pour words like water,
not minding when we would spill them everywhere,
not minding that we were going nowhere.
Do you remember?
I could draw the shape of your body in one line that never left the paper.
I could see your house as just a line from my door step to the edge of your bed.
I used to pretend that I had a voice
and that it spoke up every time you touched me
when I didn't want you to.
Pretending pretending pretending
that you had heard me a million times but
you still never stood up to leave.
When I think of the road
I hear you singing at the tops of your lungs
driving me home just so that you could sit next to me in a car for an hour,
then asking to stay the night.
Sleeping next to me almost without your clothes on
pretending to be there when you were always somewhere else,
when I was always someone else.
And I never did mind.
Not until you asked me what real love was
and I only could hold numbers on my tongue
until I was old enough to know what throwing your entire life away for someone else was like
until I was old enough to know what it was like
to be broken, broken, broken.
I hear your footsteps.
I know you long to be here sometimes and lie through your teeth
when you say there is distance between us.
You lie through your teeth when you say we have become
distant.
We have not become anything
because we are still
nothing. No
thing.
Not until I believe in things
again,
not until I believe that I exist
again,
not until I believe again.