All The Things We Felt

We were magic and everybody else

was just witness to it...

And when the world felt like

a blurry, spinning, marvelous mess,

we believed in goodness all the same.

—

You left last weekend,

and the city fell apart in your absence.

Nothing felt right without you here.

Why couldn't you stay?

My dream journal is filled with scribbles about

the way you'd touch the ends of my hair.

How our chests felt pressed up against each other.

Now I flinch just thinking about the intimacy.

I'd give anything to know what's going on

inside your head these days.

You always said we are the same,

but now it's obvious that we're not:

I am emotional and rushed

and you are calculated and detached.

I wish I was quieter. I wish I was more like you.

All this talk of independence and freedom

when we both know that

I'd follow you across the universe.

Please don't forget me and all the things we did.

All the things we felt.

—

The warmth as winter finally melted into spring.

Like flinging the windows open after a storm and

letting the gold pour in.

All earthy and raw and good.

Last September:

drinking iced coffee downtown

and talking about the goodness of God

and dreaming about where we'd end up.

I think I knew then.

That night we sat by the creek:

skipping stones and making wishes

and believing that we were

the product of something holy.

A miracle. Destiny, or fate.

Almost like the universe needed us to

know each other.

Remember the disappointment with me:

when the bruises turned green,

when the gentleness turned into coldness,

when we realized that we were actually capable

of hurting each other.

You weren't the person I needed you to be.

I wasn't the person you wanted me to be.

It's only right to commemorate the carnage:

how we barely survived.

How sometimes it feels like we didn't.

That time I cried on your living room floor

and laid myself bare.

I had never felt so vulnerable or soft before.

I would have given you all of me that night.

In some ways, I did.