I miss your seaweed hair, always swimming the wrong way down stream trying to find your oceans.

It's okay to tell the waves inside your head to settle down, but someone please take this hurricane out of my chest.

My heart is an unnamed island, and if people were places you'd be the Pacific floor.

Or a waterfall of tears falling like ink into my journal.

And I'm sorry for turning you into just another poem, another line on the paper.

But you're more, you're a book with half the pages ripped out that I'm so desperately trying to read.

Because I just need to know that I'm a part.

And if it were a story, I'd want to paint sunsets in your snow globes and make your coffee wrong on the first try but right every other time.

I'd kiss you so hard that the calcium from the milk in your coffee would stick to my teeth and make my bones grow stronger.

And you would need me so badly that the buildings in our city will start to weep and grow bridges over the space between them so that the walk to your house won't be as long.

I'll make sure you know everything is a different color when I hold your hand and that you make me feel like the sunset and the sun rise at the same time.

You'd love me to the moon, which you would gladly rip out of the sky to prove it.

But this isn't a fairy tale, and you can't trust the dark parts of the moon you can't see.

I know you've been reflecting shadows and trying to find the light, but I'm sorry I couldn't show it you.

I'm just an abandoned one story neighborhood desperate to be a skyscraper.

My dreams are trickling out of my body like water dripping down a shower drain.

It's heart breaking.

So now I've been searching through thrift shops looking for one gently used to replace the crimson mess that was once mine.

With this one, maybe I can engrave your name across it without dying.

I just wonder if you know when my mind wanders that  I'm pretending you're a love letter.

How I'd treat your neck like the sealing of an envelope, and treat you like it's my first and last time to place a postage stamp.

Or how I imagine you holding me in your arms like a prayer book. 

But your hands cause continental drifts, and I'm sure as hell not running away from the way you say my name like it's a question you only have the courage to ask over voicemail.

When I speak to you I stutter, and I call it broken poetry but my spine's still intact.

You only kissed me quick, and I know you wanted sober confessions but courage never looked good clinging to my shoulders. 

But I still feel the same when I'm drunk and I always want to fix a drink when I think about you. And your heart. And how it doesn't beat for me.

Your words are like whiskey that don't hit me 'til three am.

I just wanted to be the reason your stomach turns when you see an airport terminal, and every time we'd touch the windows and doors would open and they'd stay that way forever.

If you're not seeing rainstorms like pages in the back of the newspaper, I must not be yelling loud enough. my echoes against my bedroom walls aren't getting through to you.

So maybe I should go out, show you that not all forests have dark parts.

Your body is a city with all the lights turned out, and your pulse is every cricket that chirps at night.

But I am the girl sitting outside with a flashlight scribbling this down.

And I just keep hoping that when the sun finally comes out we can let our feet step to the same song and neither of us would bother to change our tempo.

And then I could tell you about the night I couldn't breathe, and how there were hiccups in my hands as I reached for something tangible when words turned into bullets.

And I'd tell you I promise to never let our love become a target practice.

But you're gone. I never knew goodbye could cost me every once of breath I have.

And my ribs crack when I think of the words after goodbye.

But the day when the air has left my lungs I can finally tell you