I wonder how he feels, travelling to work every day, to the home I was never ready to outgrow,
With a middle-chunk of my heart in a back pocket, bleeding through the desk chair, feeling still classroom air, reliving the scent of fresh printer paper and shelves of aged laminated textbooks.
Roots pulled out of their soil, tendrils reaching in a dead space for the memory of a warmth that once lived there. Nature doesnāt have eyes to know when itās futile.
Miles detached from where I am, my system has forgotten how it feels to be in one place at one time. I was moving so fast, back then, I ripped open the packet, and the seeds went flying across the room in all directions, parts hidden under the fridge and behind cabinets, in hiding cobwebbed corners that wonāt be seen for decades, yet somehow,,
The memory of him is one of those corners, and some viral growth thrives there in unseen dark, clinging to the underside of my windowsill, itās own murky blood dropping onto my forehead while I sleep.
Like mould, every time I think itās dead and gone and evaporated, a warm shadow pours over me in the early morning, and half awake, the day greets me with all the delicate melancholy of that specific flavour of longing he planted in me. Without looking, he did something so permanent and devastatingly beautiful. Purple watercolour splotches of a bruise you canāt stop poking and prodding.
And itās all I feel for days
Itās so hard to describe when you have always feared men. But itās kind of like walking an entire planet of rain and battering, numbing cold, to find one inch of ground bathed in light.
A heavenly beam that shot down from the ceiling of the universe for millions of miles, defying probability. My skin remembered how to feel, pins and needles. It still rained there, but it felt nice. But it was almost blinding, and sometimes I got dizzy if I stared for too long.
Itās been six years, and the corner I spend most of my energy ignoring, is the one that tells me nothing will ever feel like this again, nothing and nobody else will arouse such awe again.
I left that warm patch of light and dove headfirst into the infinite black cosmos. Swallowed, but I never heard the door close behind me. It happened in an instant, and Iāve been engulfed for years now, even my eyes gave up playing tricks in the dark
And as I float, I carry with me a little undying fire above my stomach and below my heart, that no longer warms me. It just burns.