Just One Place

I am not the one meeting you
on the subway platform.
I am not the one in the car.
I am not the one
creating the sound 
of chitin against flesh.
Give me a day
where I can dream all about you
again. No one else,
no one else.

I am an artist
because
of everything that’s happened to me
and what I’ve chosen
to do with it.

I’ve been quiet.
I mean, you can only write
so many times
about being with someone
who doesn’t love you
back.

It’s exhausting.

We were supposed to
put the color
into everything
again.

Dear god.
The nightmares only stop
when I ask you to make them stop
and I wake up feeling okay
but then I stand up
and there are the tidal waves.
I am sorry that I ask you for things.
I am sorry that I asked him for things.
Grace came from you both.

[full]

You line the top of your mantle,
imported marble from Italy
(a fact that you are sure
is supposed to mean something,
yet it doesn’t stir a single motion
in you), with colored bottles
and framed images of New England
songbirds and flora.

You do not fully unpack
for exactly twenty-one days.

You play your music low,
take afternoon naps with your cat
in the curl of your stomach,
get homesick for people
each Monday, quietly cry by Tuesday,
and start breathing at a normal rate
again by Wednesday.

You have planted a flower
in a small white pot
on your kitchen windowsill,
and for the first time it has grown
to bloom, yet for some
strange and indiscernible reason
it bends and reaches away from the sun,
away from the glass, away
from the warmth.

You are cutting your hair again,
this could only mean one thing.

You have tried to end your relationship
twice out of loneliness,
each time failing, each time
getting on a train
and traveling north.

You are certain,
that it wasn’t the last time.
You are not lost.