You – Part 3

this poem was written at 2:30am after I woke up from a bad dream about this particular “You”. In the dream, they were naming constellations with another woman. So funny the way something so simple like naming constellations could set me off so much that I jolted awake and wrote this piece! Perhaps I’m too sentimental. Anyway, it’s barely edited and I would like to keep it that way. There was something so raw about how I felt when I wrote this that I want to maintain.

She will know you by your name.

By the bounce in your walk, by the touch of your hand.

This woman, the new one, she will know your voice
She will know you by the scent on your neck
She will know you by the brand of coffee in your pantry

She will know your stomach against her back and your hair in her fingers and your voice behind her ear.

But she will not know you, me.

She will not not know you by the way your body curled up beside mine on a 30 degree morning

She will not know you, voice cracking in the backseat of my car, your eyes looking up at me for once, your hand on my chest and your jeans unbuttoned

She will not know you bated breath, your hands on my waist, the hours slipping away from us as it thunders, and the promise of our future eager beneath our skin

She will not know you whispering my name, your eyes closing, something like a cry in your throat, something like a crack in our love.

She will not know you standing across the bed from me, tunnel vision, telling me all the ways you come apart around me, and the ways I fall apart around you

She may know me by name.
She may know me by photo.
I know that you will tell her.

But she will not know that in knowing you, she shall know me in every way that matters
In knowing you, she shall know my heartbeat, my breath
She shall know what makes me fall apart.

She shall know the crack in chest
The bruise on my brain
The joy laced between my teeth

This woman. The new one. I believe I will like her.
She shall be just like me, after all.

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Glass

You have always been more glass bottle than man
Hard and cold on the outside but something good on the inside
Maybe
But don’t you know that the outside matters?
Don’t you know it’s the only part I can hold?

Might

I mourn
Not the life we had together
But the one we could have had.
The one we saw in between coffee at the breakfast table and the museum trip we took once.
That life that was glimmering and shiny and seemed too perfect to be true.
The life that you and I both wanted so desperately.
The life we deserved.
The life that maybe if we had reached out a little further
Pressed the tips of our fingers into that shining, shimmering, fantastic light,
Maybe we could have grabbed it.
Maybe there’s still time
Maybe there’s not.

I mourn the life that I wanted with you.
I mourn the person that I could have been and the person that you could have been.
God,

you could have been great.

I think that if I were to blow this candle out now, the last thing that you laid your hands on in this place,
That I would extinguish the both of us.

But I must put out the flame.
Or it could burn this house down.

The Woman From the Other Side

I miss the one I was before I knew. One time I stepped into the smelly bathroom because it was the only one vacant and as I turned on the light a large black spider ran from the door frame to under the toilet. And I knew. It knew it was in there with me, under the toilet, waiting. But there was no other bathroom and I really had to go, bladder ready to burst. In that moment, I wished I hadn’t seen that spider. I wish when I walked into the bathroom I had kept my gaze up, instead of down, and had never seen it. That way, when I used the bathroom I would have sinply uses the bathroom. But instead I was a twitching, jumpy mess in there, waiting for the spider that I knew was sharing breathing space with me, to come and bite my flesh. Of course it would have been the same if I hadn’t known. The spider still would be there, but my anxiety wouldn’t.
It is the same with him. I miss the one I was before I knew. Before. Before I knew how he slept and how he snored loud. Before I knew that he always cut his fingernails down to the nubs and before I knew that he smelled like cheap shampoo. Before I knew that he only liked to hold hands for about 5 minutes before he claimed his hands were going numb. I long for the one I was before I knew how his skin sizzled against mine. I miss the one I was before I had been seen by him. Before I was seen by him I had never been seen by anyone. Not even myself.
If I could, I would go back now. Not forever, but for just a moment. And I would look at myself. Really look at myself. I would examine every remarkable piece of me. Where my thighs meet my hips. Where my ears meet my head. Where my knees bend and my stomach dips and the birthmark on my shoulder blade. And I would bow to her. My creator. The me who existed first. The woman from before. I deserve to know her.

You. In Many Parts. 2

My post this week is a continuation of “You. In Many Parts”. I had fun writing this one, though the subject matter seems bleak. This piece is unfinished (as every writer says), but I think it perfectly sums up my feelings towards this “you” and thus, must be published!

2. When you look at me, you don’t really look at me. You look through me.

You don’t look through me like I’m a mirror or a window or a ghost or something helplessly poetic like that, but you look through me like I’m eyeglasses. Like you’re happy that I’m there so you can use me to see things more clearly.

And when I take my clothes off for you there’s surprise in your eyes. It’s like you’re seeing me for the first time, but really you’re not. You’ve seen me a million times before this, in a million different iterations before this, only just now you’re seeing my body.

And is this how it is? Do you really have to see my body to know that I have one? Just like you think you’d have to see my brain to know that I have that too?

I have existed before you for many years. Centuries, it seems, and in many universes. I am a constant for you. Always here and ready to make myself an extension to you. I’m your extra limb in this life. In another life perhaps I’m the chains on your tires. In the next, the spare blanket beneath your bed. And in your favorite life, maybe I’m your mother, loving you without conditions or expectations.

Don’t I exist for you? Don’t I exist in real space? Don’t I prove to you everyday that I deserve you? That I deserve your gaze? Your soul? Don’t I give you my mind every night and my skin every morning? Don’t you beg for it? It feels that way, at least.

“You.” In Many Parts. 1

A little different from my other pieces on here, I have a collection of saved works entitled “You” that I have written about many “you’s” in my life. I write these pieces in order to sort out my feelings about someone and better understand my emotions toward them. Often, what I think of someone initially, isn’t really who they are. And sometimes the subjects for these pieces aren’t really people at all, but only the image of the person with the personality I made up in my head. These pieces are mostly streams of my consciousness and make little to no sense without context, but they’re clarifying for me. They’re sort of like little letters that I would mail to the person or read to their face uninterrupted if it weren’t for my own cowardice. I figured that I would start publishing these here because maybe you all have similar feelings about similar people and maybe you can relish in that with me 🙂

1. I was surprised when it was you I saw at the door.
I mean, in a way, I have always been waiting for you.
Yes, I knew you would come and greet me. My friends had long told me that you existed and that you would be here to take me away or make me cry or something awful and terrific like that. You would take your hat and coat off and set them on the rack. And perhaps you would put your hands in your pockets and watch me from across the foyer.
And I imagined that I would be excited to see you. Or that I would feel, butterflies in the very least.
But what I felt, when you actually appeared, wasn’t that. It was the absence of breath and speech. It was air swirling between us without purpose or direction. It was empty.
You just weren’t what I expected.
Your hand was warm in my cold one, yes, but your eyes were all wrong. And your hair wasn’t done right. And you wore all the wrong clothes. All wrong. But you were there at my door, waiting for me. Yes, it was only me there for you. I was relieved to see you but not excited. Not the way I thought that I would be, don’t you see that?
And you! Relieved to see me too, but not surprised. The expression on your face was downright bored. You wore no hat but you adjusted the watch on your hand. Had you been waiting for the right moment to turn and leave? Had you preferred the abyss to me?
Can’t you see that I’m not what you expected either?
But there was hope in my chest for the future. Hope that time would be slow and that we would grow in, rather than up. Perhaps we still can.