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Description
I’ve got a pocketful of dreams, crumbs of birthday-wishes
enough to sustain me for another three-hundred and sixty-five
days. I am bathed in the musk of pine-smoke, years of running through
forest fires and living in the lair of bear-trap bare-jaw bear-boys. My father
he taught me that you can’t outrun a hurricane, my mother she taught me
you can breathe underwater for longer than you expect, can drown for decades,
and the photographs of me, fourteen and prickle-faced, they taught me that
happiness and sadness are just two sides of the same coin, circling in endless
figures of eight, clandestine and incandescent and following a meter I cannot hear.

You have a fist full of nothings, eat hopelessness for breakfast and hold loneliness
tight in the trenches of your forehead, clenched in your frown lines. You are a raincloud,
nomadic and brooding, hovering on the horizon bloated with doubt. A wanderer, I
wonder where you will wander to next, if you will come and extinguish the crackling
embers of yesterdays that hiss at my heels, if you will teach me to float, to fly, to free
myself. But the ground holds me still and the sky tethers you there and we are
separated by tectonic plates, gravity, and timezones. You taught me that impossible
is more than a state of a mind, you taught me that love can be cruel, you taught me
that letting go is an art-form that I will never be able to perfect. My brush-strokes will
always be messy, childish, I will always finger-paint my way clumsily through goodbyes
while you are calligraphic and composed and composing our end with intricate webs of
sketched simplicity.

Here we are, my love, me a girl running from fire to fire, heart-beat racing for so long
that I can’t tell if it is the running or your ghost that makes it pound like that. You, a
miserable, swollen raincloud looking for a place to spill and dissipate, seeing my amber
glow around the constant curve of the earth and always deciding that you hold too
little, that you hold too much, that you hold nothing at all. I would split these crumbs
with you, would split my soul for you, would climb up any mountain to reach you but
you will never land, never lean down and kiss me and that is our fatal flaw, my love.
There are gaps in our skeletons just as there are hollows in our hearts and my love,
this pulse will not slow, watching you trail misty-eyed into a nebulous nether-region
of a world I have hardly touched, have hardly stopped long enough to see.

I have a picture of you in my mind and every time I can only see the separation where
there should be unity, the goodbye hiding in your hello, your frown lines identical to my
smile lines.

My lonely little raincloud, I cannot stop long enough to tell you all of this and you would
be mid-way through farewell before I even started anyway. And now here we are, my love,
here I am and there you are and look at all this space, ashen and burnt, that lies smoking
between us. We have painted ourselves into opposite corners and I guess that’s all there is
to say, even with so much aching unsaid in my veins, even with so many unuttered words
heavy in your stomach.