It is not a regretful time I write in,
though it is full of half empty coffee cups and dumpsters that smell like
“I forgot again. I forgot again.”
Being lost in a crowd is nothing more than not missing you when I sleep and scratching away my first layer of skin when I’m awake
and never knowing which way I should take when the traffic lights turn
and turn
and turn,
and I’m at a stand still
because there’s something that something is supposed to be
and I understand that one day fate will have eaten me fully
and while it gnaws on my long brown hair
I think of all the nightmares where I cut it off
and you were never there.
I’ll pull my covers up and count my toes
and take some comfort in the fact that the number never alters
because when things change I dance on my window sills and think of the times
when I wanted to jump and the desolation would dress me
and I always looked like a mourner.

Shiny black patent shoes. I watched them lower you into the ground
and I was so young all I could wonder was how long it would take the
grass to grow back.
But now I know.
It’s been a year
and nothing has changed
and everything has changed.

I’m wearing contacts every day and at first it took me hours to get them in
and I’d cry and cry and cry and my makeup would run and I stopped being pretty
but now I am pretty again and they go in fine and I miss you.

      I drink tea now and I put way too much sugar in it and you would hate it
                          and I stopped calling and I stopped waiting
                                              and you stopped.
                         And I stopped wishing and I stopped writing
                                              and you stopped.

It’s just as well.
I was thinner last year and my body now--
you would hate it.
But everyone still smiles at me.

                               What can I do if they keep lowering the standards?

I meet the demand and they punch my card and put the pillows over my face
to block out the light
and I sleep till noon
and I read the propaganda they put out about “Self Help!” and I believe it
because it is more convenient that way
and I roll out of bed and make tea
and my cat is there to sit on my chest and suffocate me and let me
enjoy the weight for a bit.

I take walks on my own now when it’s cloudy and I think it might rain
because it’s beautiful when the sky is gray
and not strongly black or white
and not strongly left or right.

                                                Neutrality is what I need right now.

[Sometimes I look through the newspaper and when I set the sadness down there is ink on my hands and I think that is very symbolic.]

I talk to my friends about you now, so you’re not so much a secret.
Bad techno plays in the background
and I explain my life to them in drumbeats.
They think I’m beautifully tragic
and they think you are a phantom.

When I talk about you now I cloak you in a heavyset hood and I say things like,
“But I don’t regret it,” and “I’m lucky to just have had the time,” and
the strange thing is I mean it.
That doesn’t mean I still don’t bake copious amounts of food and
have no one to serve them to,
just like the hours when we would stretch out there together and wouldn’t have to talk
and now I wonder if we should have
because me just lying in your arms didn’t keep you here.

I don’t blame you
but
I don’t blame myself
so I am in a predicament
whose proportions are so epic I may just scream.
I may just.
I
think that someday I’ll write a memoir and your name will be something romantic in the first draft
and then I’ll go back and change it of course because you are no one but yourself
and then nothing will seem right after that and I will never finish it and I’ll call it a waste of time
and throw it out,
but I’ll know what transpired
before it all expired
and got tossed into the garbage.
                           I rolled into the road and just started walking
                           but I had no where to go.

So where do I go from here?

All the bus stops and the airports are dead
and my luggage is sown into my stomach and everything is sideways
and upside down and I need some coffee.
Or tea.
I drink tea now.
And some things are just getting worse and worse though time should heal all and I just want to let you know
that this love is like an airplane, exhaust dribbling out its back end pipes
and making heaven harder to breathe in
while you are inside, thousands of feet above the world
and safe.

Five-inch thick windows of my tears, air pressure tight, and clear plastic bags where the oxygen may not inflate anything at all—
I will never forget you.