counting myself back to sanity. starting now.

you went and ran away again, leaving a tangled up mess in your wake. you don't dream, just reach for flickers of flame that run along the ceilings edges; threatening to burn down all we have built. i don't blame you. with your head in you hands and voice no more than a whisper. but you don't apologize, your voice stays the same. "just come here." and "don't go." that's it. that's all there ever was. holding on to the memory of a mistake, your bones aligned with mine. i never wanted more than everything, and you knew that. but you refuse to do as i need you to; let your winter melt away and bring back my summer. my ocean i would have willingly drowned in. "anything for you." i wasn't lying when i said it. hands tied and strung up to die. love, it never was. just lust wrapped in comfort, in the safety of another. honesty, a noose binding us both.

unwound. i catch glimpses of the sky here and there; hazy stars behind heavy clouds. i am no longer floating in the space between awake and dreaming. i am unsure. my bed is empty, my room filled with white, warm light that ignites my eyes when i open them. the unreal has my head in a vice. i wish for roots to anchor me. let me be like daphne, let me saved from the incinerating embrace of apollo. i held him once but gravity took it's toll, wrenching him away to continue on his revolution of everything else. in three days it will be three years. three years since i woke up to a vivid, lucid, dream of twisted vines and forests growing ever greener. eternal summer. laughter ringing through me, echoing in my hollow self, filling me with purpose, movement. i held reason like an ember; it burned through me with every touch of your hand and whispered word. you're but a star in my sky now, distant and smoldering behind pollution and empty space. i'd like to think that your travels will bring you back to me; like the rising and setting marking the passing of days. but i realize i was simply an acknowledgment; my hands were outstretched to anyone willing to take them; too weak to pull myself free of the roots that i had grown and vines that had bound me. you took them. you took me. and for a while, we flew together. i became someone i had only dreamed of; a still sea on a moonless night. when you tore yourself away, i had forgotten the truth that your light had blinded me to. i will stand under the sky, alone, until the end of my days. and even then, my eyes will always be gazing into the heavens for one fleeting image of you.

“And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face. His poem, “I did it, I.” Such violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists. The one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words; his poems are strong and blasting like a high wind in steel girders. And I screamed in myself, thinking: oh to give myself crashing, fighting, to you.”