Unrequited love. A play in nine acts.
One. The question hangs a hook through my pink cheek. How did you do that thing that you did to my heart?
Two. Because isn’t the real tragedy in how you found yourself in one another, how you took one brief look into the mirror of her, turned around, and walked away?
Three. The girl’s arms are empty, but her fists are filled with the laughter of ghosts; watch their fitful ridicule each time she cries over love less real than they are.
Four. There are baseballs falling out of my mouth. Each ball a name of a body I reached for in the dark to find myself. A parade of honest names slip from the grip of my loose glove jaw. The love I want is a basketball, a heavy thumping in the chest. When it is my turn to step up to the plate, I do not swing. I do not swing.
Five. Her name is a wooden ship. To try and force it into his glass bottle heart would only break her.
Six. A montage of all the times I wished you had taken my hand, and then when you didn’t and the moment passed, a montage of all the places I wished myself far, far away to. Portland, Barcelona, basically any place I have never seen your smile.
Seven. What is the name of a place that everyone can see is burning but no one can feel the effects of the smoke or the heat of the flames except the place? And that place is not a place but a person and that person is the I in my poems? Only it’s my real life body that aches. And isn’t that love? Not being able to see the explosion even though you are the one holding the bomb? And the bomb is also you?
Eight. The girl’s hair turns to forget-me-nots and thyme. Her bones soften to willow branches. Her skin flakes maple leaves. Her chest is now a cabinet of well-stacked cigar boxes, caskets carrying memories she is slow-turning to ash. In lieu of conversation, she passes smoke. The girl collects seashells, upturns them into bowls, fills them with dried lavender and amethyst in hopes of luring someone new. Still, remembering is her favorite pastime. She cannot hold her heart up without trembling so she hides it away in the bottomless midnights, which are her grief but are also her lust. The girl is now a girl who is also a whale full of unoccupied space, and it’s tragic how she displaces her emptiness with loneliness. How she wants and wants and wants and needs to know why, why the boy might want to live so far away from her now when his house is just a couple blocks south of ten minutes and all that space lays still, loud as a snail’s cry. Wouldn’t I know about crawling up inside oneself? Wouldn’t I know about a body full of waiting and a floor, clean as a plate in a cupboard holding nine other plates on top of it? How it’s all so unbearable, holding love? How it makes the girl feel helpless? This period of heavy pockets of change her heart is unwilling to make?
Nine. Did you hear me? I said, I love you. I said, I still love you. Still, you.
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