Getting you out of my mind

is like separating the

                  wind

from the

                          cloud.

I’m so afraid of losing someone I never had.

I’m utterly lovesick, physically ill. Doubled over from the waves of self-loathing and rejection. “Here comes a feeling you’d thought you’d forgotten.” I wish I had. But I always knew it would return to me, as it always does, always has, always does. Looking for love in all the wrong places. Taken and given and taken back again. Teased and taunted with promises of friendships, of lovers, of loves, of friends. Never mine for too long, never safe for too long. Constant push and pull, ebb and flow of love…inside of me nothing is ever forgotten. Why is it theirs to give and take? Why no love for me to make haste with? Does anyone want mine at all? Lovesick. A permanent patient. Lonely, lonely, sick heart of mine. Ruining my body, ruining my mind. Diseased with sorrows. Please? I say. Please. Please. Please. Love me for a while, make it last. Please. 

Are you aware of your beauty?  Not in the way that invites vanity, a mirror could tell you all you wish to know. I mean, are you aware of your beauty? The you that exists outside the glare of attention that surrounds you. There is something your eyes that suggest you don’t. That every camera flashing leaves you confused. Every single time, I imagine you hesitate and wonder, why? I’ll tell you. It’s because you glow.
That’s all I have. Just your glowing image in my mind. Perhaps, it’s best that we don’t speak. I want to hold this. Remember you this way. No knowledge of the hearts you’ve broken. The women you promised to call after. The way they waited and waited and waited longer than they are proud of. I don’t want to know you regular. Flesh and bone, pain inducing ex-lover. Someone’s horrible ex-boyfriend. I need your glowing image.
I have my own horrible and broken to contend with, I refuse to add you to the collection.

So I suppose, I must will myself to forget you. To dismiss the possibility of breath on cheek. Hand firm and gentle on small of back.  I refuse the draw of your face. Invite famine rather than imagine making a feast of your mouth.
Even, I, a glutton for creating my own heartbreak can not justify the way you haunt my dreams. The way you follow me into morning. The way mid-day conjures up thoughts of you. Night offers no solace from the oppressive always of you on my mind.
I must create a farewell song that exists only for me.
You, however, are welcome to find me. Prepare yourself for the flood.

He reminds me of laying on my kitchen floor playing with the dust floating in the rays of sunshine. Of the feeling of my baby blanket on my cheek. My niece’s newborn apple breath. And my father’s french toast on Sunday mornings. The first time you hear a choir sing. And looking at Christmas lights in your very own living room on Christmas Eve. Of waking up to fresh snow when you’re seven years old. Whispering in the dark after mommy says to go to sleep. Of new shoes. Getting an acceptance letter in the mail. And riding on your puppy’s back when you’re five years old and you pretend she’s a pony. Of my pink glitter bike with the streamers. And wearing my plastic crown to class. He’s like sitting on the beach when it’s too early. Like driving down an empty street in the middle of the night but not being afraid. Of a warm bath. My grandmother’s maple brown hands. And a baby walking for the first time into your arms. He’s like everything good that’s ever happened in my life. That makes me afraid. 

Hands on hips, fingers, lips. So soft, like petals, dancing on the tips of my-inhale. Exhale. You, smelling of now and then, smelling of summertime showers, the essence of sea salt and you, bathed beneath ginger, mint, faucet flow. Nestled in your neck, collar bones to high cheek bones, muscle and skin and us, tangled knotted to together like ridges sloping down from shoulder to elbow. Perfect buds, traced with my tongue, pink, turned down on each end, up and down arch to arch like melodious intonations on sheet music, your lips are, crafted, adagio, scales, I’m compelled to sing the notes as you press your mouth to mine. Muffled sighs are all that escape me now. The softest statue, David made of honey-suckled flesh. Not mine, but partly, forever captured in my memory, those nights, those mornings. 

“What I remember most is your skin on my skin… The tightening of your grip on my hips, the moans and sighs, the serenity of the moment after. I do not understand why someone would want to pretend that never happened. The infinite moments are the ones together. We were infinite together. It was each of us separately that broke us. “