My friend Derrick says “Love is the only war worth dying for”
But every time I say “Please come back” I feel like I’m trying to find a dirty needle in a haystack, and God knows, I can’t go out like that
I suppose we wear our traumas the way the guillotine wears gravity
Our lovers' necks are so soft
I lost my head so many times, I got sober just hoping my eyes would dry
Still I drink so much in my sleep, I can't sleepwalk a straight line to the guest room
Where collapse hangs so heavy inside her lungs, she speaks and her voice trips across her heart beat, each word limps into the air
"We are gone" she says
And I am no mortician
I have no idea how to put makeup on the dead
I have no idea how to un-erase, so I just puddle at the door, my face looking like a deck of falling cards, like everyone's been playing me
We tried so hard
But when I said "Give me a ring"
You thought I meant a call, now I haven't had your number for three years we've been saying "how many times are we gonna keep cutting these red flags into valentines?"
You know, all those wars we fought have turned our shine into rust, now we can't even touch each other's hearts without a Tetanus shot, we can't begin to remember what we forgot there is no shelter in the womb
The heart forms long before the ribcage, my mother swore she could feel me kicking weeks before my feet formed, that's how hard my heart beat
And it still does
But they say the womb is where you learn that the cord that feeds you could at any moment wrap around your neck
I hold my breath for the entire 56 seconds it takes her
To walk to the window, to stare at the road
To tell me she has nothing left
To tell me we are done carrying our level heads in our tornado chests
And for the first time
I know she is right
As the dawn after our first date, we were so young
I hadn't written an honest love poem yet
Hadn't met anyone I could fall so hard for
'Til the night we kissed on our skateboards
You teased me for going so slow
I said I never wanna catch up
To the letting go
I want the plead in my throat to forever anchor my spine in the seams of your worn slippers, love
Even when that dove crashed through the window
Even when our friends said You can call it love
But you know, Einstein called himself a pacifist when he built the bomb
When they’d ask why we stayed together for so long I’d say I don’t know. I just know we cried at the exact same time in every movie I know we blushed every day for the first two years
I know I always stole the covers, and she never woke me up, I know the exact look on her face the first night she used my toothbrush
The next day I brushed my teeth like thirty-some times Because I didn’t want to let her go
You have to understand
When it hurt to love her
It hurt the way the light hurts your eyes in the middle of the night
But I had to see
Even through the ruin
If what we were burying were seeds
There were so many plants in our house, you could rake the leaves
Even through that Winter when I was trying to make angels in the snow of your cold shoulder You were still leaving
Love notes
I’d always find them
The day before I left I remembered a story her mother once told me
She said:
Andrea, when Heather was a little girl, she could not fall asleep without tying a string around her finger which stretched to mine in the other room. All night long, she’d give that string the tiniest tug, to make sure I was still there. And when I tugged back, that was love. That was love. As easy as that. Sometimes. Sometimes.