Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days of You

For a year I had dreams of a warm, 

large nothing. At night, the lines 

that made up the ground and the houses 

and the trees blurred into an ocean,

moved by the moon, and I moved with it, 

struggling to clutch at each day 

as if losing my grip would fling me into the atmosphere.

When I couldn't hold myself 

out of the blueness any longer,

I found you already laid there and you 

told me you had been there for a while. 

You made space for me next to you,

and we stayed there together for some time, 

with only words that grew around us like crocuses.

Now, it is your 21st birthday, and all I can think of

is driving to the resale shop last winter, both of us

returning to my house with nipped cheeks.

You held my old cello between your knees,

wrapped your body around its soft neck and

told me about the time you wanted to fall asleep

in a lake. Then, you told me how you stood 

at the edge of a dock and decided to keep breathing.

That was four years ago. Four years ago, 

you decided to breath. Six months before I met you, 

you decided to breath, and I’m so glad you did

because you showed me poetry 

in all of the spaces you moved:

walking through your concrete city, 

or your hands curled around tall grass, 

or you on a makeshift stage speaking your words 

into your hands, opening your fingers 

like you are giving the ground all you have to say.

I think about you every day, because of what you gave me:

the appreciation for all of my hours no matter how cold and sharp

they stick under my skin, because maybe I could find the words

that make them something beautiful.

How heavy a thing life is:

it pulls away at skin, so acidic, wrecked with 

the heaviest of gravities, but I have learned to love 

another year finished, grown from 

a soil tended to, made fertile again

by hands, my hands that once were swallowed 

by so much blue, and today, I thank you for your

hospitality, in a garden of just blooming crocuses.

because it’s your twenty-first birthday, and because

I have a reason to live a life

that hurts like a million needle pricks,

repeated every day, because just this morning 

I woke up excited, waiting to make something beautiful,

something worth living another day to witness.