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.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prism, andrea gibson