-.. — / -.– — ..- / … - .. .-.. .-.. / .-.. — …- . / – .

(Do You Still Love Me?)

 

How lucky these sheets would have been to know you.

How I can only imagine that these walls longed to embrace you by more than just your name. More than just the whispers of a cracked telephone receiver. More than old, folded plane tickets and a suitcase that still isn’t completely unpacked. 

Yours was the first picture I ever hung up.

But just like the cracked stucco melded over the once gutted, plastered walls of our hotel room,
I fear I will never again get to sleep next to you. 

I worry that this life wants more out of us than we were ever prepared to give.

The thing about the ocean and the moon is that the tide knows just when to come in.
It knows when to leave so that the shore continues to beg for a second goodbye kiss,
And when the waves are absent for just a little too long, the moon hurls its adoration back at the sun,
Not knowing the difference between a tidal wave and tsunami,
Not knowing that sometimes begging for forgiveness will only destroy what you were trying to preserve. 

And I will never be able to protect you just by loving you.

We both know we cannot keep each other from hurting ourselves.

But there are times I don’t think these sheets know the difference between salt water and a glass of milk.
They will never tell me what I can and cannot cry over,
Especially since they have never known you.

So all these words spill out of my mouth and I still don’t know what to do with them. I don’t know what story I’m trying to tell.

It sounds somewhere between empty petrol containers and train stubs and wadded up receipts that doubled as tissues.
Neither of us knowing where we’re going and still hoping we’re ending up in the same place,
Still begging the stars that we still know the sound of each others voice.

I’ve heard if you close your eyes during the brightest parts of the day,
You can see galaxies painted on the insides of your eyelids,
Little geometric swirls that read like maps that can tell you where your soul mate is at any given point in time. 
So I tried it out.

I stood out in my driveway in the middle of summer and pointed my chin up at the sky and I smiled so wide I could have reflected solar beams off my teeth.

And I saw nothing.

This poem is about: 
Me
My family
My community

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