all you really want is to be here with me

Love is foreign anymore. It used to come in sweeps complete with rushes of infallability and tiny rips of inadequacy but now, now it's wandering elsewhere. I don't want it to come home anytime soon, and if it does, I plan on being away and/or deaf to the persistent knocks against every tendon in my heart-swollen body.

I wish I could say with finality: I DON'T LOVE YOU ANYMORE. But I'm afraid of lying because I hear it's a disease; I lied a lot when I was a kid, too young to understand the tangles of my own tongue. My mind lies to me, sometimes, but I can't envision reality because I swear it evades me. Kind of like lost stars on a blinking night sky: they move without wind or reason, and I can't touch them no matter how high I reach. My arms have never been long enough, my chest has never been big enough for my whims of infatuation.

Mostly I remember your skin overlapping my own, your mouth crushing mine, words firing between grasps and whispers of nightmares. You were most loving when you were half asleep. You couldn't think, then, with your brain stuffed with sleep. Words came easily, promises flowed without second thought. I love you, I want you, there is no one but you, I've never loved like this.

On the kitchen floor, with the serrations and seeds surrounding us, we aimed for the perfect photogenic kiss. We always disagreed on the best shot. All I ever wanted to do was broadcast our love.

And now, my dreams have bloomed into making out with Melissa Ferrick, which is completely weird but admittedly not a bad dream to have (two nights in a row, nonetheless). You don't need to trail me in my night visions. You are always there in the daylight, shimmers spread over my radar though I've tried again and again to turn off my signal, to shut down, unplug, abscond.

I've never been good at letting go. Never. When I fall, I fall without limits and boundaries. I don't know how to make myself stop. Maybe, I think, this could be a good thing, someday, when I'm ready and when my heart won't need to seal itself up months, years later to edge into the healing (again). And I know what the fear is. I don't know how to believe that there is someone(s) who will not force me to lock my heart and swallow the key. I don't know how to think that love may not always end up hurting me, and that someone(s) might be worthy of letting in.

So I stumble about with my hands taped to my shoulders, arms crossed, heart blocked. I can't breathe in this collapsing makeshift shelter; I wish I'd learned along the way how to run, how to fly.