I found a love letter to you in a notebook
that I have been using to plan my wedding.
There were a lot of I'm sorry’s and
wondering if you ever still think of me or
if you are lost in the recesses of your own
mind
and time,
and all of the lines it
draws in-between us.
If I could, I would go back
and do blind contour drawings of everyone
I have ever loved
I'd sign and date them, keep them somewhere
safe,
build a museum full of
artifacts dedicated to what it
was like to see them,
relics of how it felt to possess them in
a gaze,
I'd erect monuments to all the
fleeting things lost
through space and time.
Who cares when your birthday was or
what your middle name is,
I want to remember the outline of your
pronated forearm, the
dips and grooves between your knuckles,
the shape your fingernails took,
the curled hair across your face.
But if I am honest,
I do remember those things,
like flashes of lightning in a storm— they penetrate
deep layers in my brain
and light up
the synapses of youth,
make the dendrites of
discovery dance
and weep at what it felt like
(like wholeness, like coming home) to hold you,
with all that pain sitting against my spine,
the discs slipping every time she got more sick
and more sick and more sick,
and my infinite loneliness,
and my infinite sorrow,
all the hormones and
the growing up,
the fucked up dance I did where you
were not a partner
but a fixture,
and the power I felt.
The power I felt.
The control.
All my nerve
splitting me right open,
splitting me in half,
and how poisonous the things
that spilled right out of me,
the current that coarsed right through me,
like an audible heartbeat drowning out
all other sounds,
gasping for air and sucking it out of
you,
drowning and taking you under,
flailing and
I thought I knew what It All Meant,
but I knew nothing
I took everything but I knew
no thing.