Roast chicken on a Sunday evening.

Homemade.

Waffles and fortune cookies mending my prolonged childhood fear of the dark.

The same “dark” that has occupied that top-right dusty bedroom corner since I was 16; no matter how many times I moved my bed to face away from it.

 

We’re kids.

Kids trying to be ok with walking before we run when all we really want to do is fall.

Fall into each other Fall into those city lights spread out like small yellow bulbs on a line Fall into cliché cascading oceans of time uncharted

Fall

Into the blue skies that the TV promised to us when we were young, and the truth of tragedy always ended with silhouettes in the sunsets that they deserved.

Whose fault is it,

that we believed the lies of the glass screens we were sat in front of?

 

The sound of miscellaneous Goodwill coffee mugs clink in a distant kitchen cabinet.

The sound of the morning.

A morning I want to relive every day.

A morning of freshly made coffee and love.

Messy hair and naked legs contained by back porch screens doors and graced with rising lemon-flavored light.

Waking up and seeing you on the other side of white cotton sheets.

 

Rain landing on wide open nerves.

The same rain that waters the roadside daises that freckle cheeks of the earth.

The same rain that reminds me of home.

You fill the holes that this home dug in me. Holes so deep they look endless.

You have a way of drawing well-hidden vulnerability from my lips and into mutual air.

You have a way of filling.

 

And I’d like to believe we don’t live in districts of indifference. Surrounded by toothless smiles and shrugging shoulders.

I’d like to believe we’re different; That its not just the red hues of our glasses that hide the sad and sweaty but our own choice to not partake in the self-induced plague of self-absorption.

Just present enough to live but not so much so as to forget how to love.

 

                You’re my first halleluiah. My first steps into forever. My first breath of clean crisp air filling punctured lungs; aged and damaged.

Those hole in me have been aching.

Aching for you.