I hated you on the coast. With the taste of smoke on my lips I just kept looking out the glass windows wondering what the night was thinking about. If maybe we were thinking about the same things. How the moon always knows just where to pause. How I watched you love things and it felt good. But you didn’t know what it meant to love them quietly –to want them all at once but you can’t because you don’t trust yourself. You think it’s easy for me to notice things that don’t notice me. You think I’m desperately trying to take the safest road, to cling to things that won’t throw me away - you think I’m terrified, and sometimes I am. But I’m always willing to love things that don’t love me back. And we both know you’ve never loved something that didn’t need you before.

Dead friends, abandoned buildings, the smell of alcohol on someone’s breath and French glass windows. Waking up in hotel rooms to blood on your pillow, reading Shakespeare out loud and crying because I couldn’t stop stuttering, the way I heard him singing to her from the backseat once before I got too old to remember what color his eyes were, the horrible sweet smell of the slaughter houses in the summers when I was a little girl. The kind of things you give one glance and they swallow you whole, leave you belonging to all your vices, all your bad habits, to people who always leave you waiting.

I waited for a long time. In empty football fields and lonely backyards where the stars watched without a second thought. Waited in between cities and the words in your journal, in places where the feelings snaked between us, where the moments gathered at our ankles. I waited in the pit of dark theaters where we changed together, and I was a river bank, remember? I was the mud that gives a little when you step too close. I was softer once, thinking someone could look at me and see the same things. But sometimes it doesn’t work like that. Sometimes you see things in people that they’d never understand. Things they’d never see in you. And how do you measure the farness between two people? What makes up the space between us? The gaps we can’t bridge because some parts of ourselves are just so unapproachable?

I used to believe in things, my chest was roaring with them and what they did to me. And now I feel guilty and broke open. I know you’re there, I can feel you breathing. Holding your hand up to my chest and checking my pulse. Yanking it out of me to hide it behind that line between light and dark. I need to be shown the way, teach me how to move my hands through sunlight just right and I’ll follow after if you let me, if you wait until I’m ready. Parts of me have been left ajar. But maybe we can fill up the spaces together. Maybe one day when you put your hand to my heart I’ll learn how to hold my hand next to yours. We can listen to the way we breathe as two different things. And I’ll learn how to love things when I’m not afraid to anymore.

We broke off pieces of ourselves and let them live out the rest of their days tucked inside things. Like the color orange and the magnolias in the front yard. The boys with their jeans rolled up and the way sunlight would fall like little arms through their straw hats. The way Lucas remembered me on days when I was ready to be forgotten. I Wondered if god could hear me when I loved things, when my soul swelled with nameless feelings. When my pockets weren’t big enough to hold them. I’m getting old now. I’m callused in places that used to breathe like a separate life from me. Lucas doesn’t remember me these days and the boys don’t roll their jeans up no more. I wonder what god is and if I believe. Sometimes I don’t know if I do, but I know I really want to. I kiss the knee caps of hope and turn the doorknobs of my child hood. Sometimes I feel myself cradling something really sad. Something aged and aimless, something full of regret. But I breathe parts of myself into things hoping in my tiny chest that one day when I’m old enough to want them back, I’ll know where to look. And on quiet days I find myself waiting for someone else to remember me when I start thinking I’m ready to be forgotten.

you’re always cold, drinking that cheap beer to try and keep your bent bones warm. I didn’t want to fall asleep in that room with those vowels dried in my mouth. With the taste of hot spit and side ways rain. With the way you looked at me right before the lights went out in the building, like you were empty, like you were never going to have any thing to give me. I kept having nightmares on your floor. how they took you apart and put you back together again. But you were left broken. And we all dug into you with our nails trying to get anything we could. You make parts of me ache when I see you. maybe it’s just that  taste of glass. Maybe it’s just the pills we took in that attic. maybe it’s just the dreams we both have when we start to fall asleep. We tried to shake each other off but old habits die hard. I knew you’d come looking for me. you waited in the door way like you felt sorry. Tried to make it easy on me. Tried to make it look like you were the one who didn’t belong. We both knew better. And when you lit that cigarette out on the front porch I remember looking at you with the saddest feeling in my gut. Had you turned around you would have seen it on my face. It would have been ugly and broken like you. but you stood there with your back to me because you knew. You could feel it too.  We opened our palms to catch the rain falling from the hole in your roof. You told me that you’re burning from the inside out. That one day all that’s going to be left are empty spaces where the windows used to be. And the rest will be ash. The rest will be dirt and bones. You took your wet rain spattered hand and came close to touching the side of my face. I just kept thinking about how I couldn’t sleep in that house with all the words so hot in my mouth. I kept thinking about how we’re all burning from the inside out. How when you fall, we’ll both fall. How old habits die hard.