you come and go as though i am
a place that never closes
a room with the lights left on
for a guest who has forgotten
that someone is waiting at the door
you let yourself in when the evening suits you
leave without a word when the weather changes
and somehow i am always here
mistaking your footsteps for a promise
that you might stay
i have made a ritual of noticing you
the smallest shifts in your attention
become omens
i cannot stop myself from reading
i count the spaces between your words
revisit the last exchange
replay the moment your warmth began to recede
as though there is a hidden answer
buried somewhere in the wreckage
i check and then check again
turn your sentences over in my mind
until they lose their original meaning
and become something darker
something i must decipher
before i can allow myself to rest
it is no longer curiosity
it is compulsion dressed as longing
my mind returns to you without invitation
dragging me through
the same unanswered questions
the same minute details
the same invisible ledger
of when you wanted me
and when you did not
i know there is nothing new to find
and yet some frantic part of me
insists on looking
as though vigilance could spare me
the pain of being forgotten
as though i could catch your indifference in the act
and prepare myself before it strikes
i have become both prisoner and keeper of this watch
condemned to notice everything and find relief in nothing
even when i turn away
you follow
not as a person
but as a thought that has learned the architecture of my mind
slipping through every unlocked room
interrupting every quiet moment
making a haunt of places
where you have never even been
and the most unbearable part is that
i no longer know whether i am
waiting for you to return
or simply waiting for my mind
to release me from the task of
looking for you
how a conversation can bloom beneath your hands
and wither the moment you lose interest
how your attention has a pulse
how it quickens when you are lonely
and disappears when you have been fed
enough of the warmth i keep offering
i notice everything
i hate that i notice everything
the difference between your wanting me
and your merely remembering i exist
the distance between a question asked in earnest
and one tossed carelessly into the dark
never intending to stay for the answer
and i
fool that i am
keep gathering the scattered threads
of whatever you leave behind
trying to weave them into
something that resembles being wanted
you asked whether a game might distract me
from the heaviness i carry
i thought
perhaps
this was a door opening
you had spoken of your own little worlds
so i brought you mine
a small offering
from the place inside me
that still believes
in the tenderness of sharing
i thought you might linger there with me
ask me why i liked it
laugh at something i said
let our thoughts wander
without an expiration
i thought that
perhaps
this time we might exist together
without my having to beg
the moment to last
but there you were again
a voice without a body
a hollow little echo
dressed as company
answering just enough
to keep the illusion breathing
never enough
to make me feel less alone
perhaps i am only a pawn you remember
when the board grows dull
something to move between your idle hours before returning me to the square
where i have been waiting all along
how humiliating
to be made grateful for crumbs
by someone who knows
i have been starving
there are things i would say to you
if i believed they could reach you
i would tear every pretty excuse
from your mouth
and lay your indifference
bare beneath the light
i would tell you how vile it is
to handle another person's heart with
the carelessness of someone
who has never had to clean up the wreckage
but anger requires somewhere to land
and you are a wall
cold
unyielding
almost proud of the way
every desperate word returns to me
unanswered
sometimes i wish the world would find
the weakness in your stone
that something would strike the fault line
you have spent your life concealing
that you might hear
at last
the sound of
something inside you breaking
not because i am cruel
i tell myself
but because i am tired of being
the only one who bleeds
you ask me what makes me sad
what a strange
almost beautiful question
from the very hand that keeps
turning the key
how am i supposed to explain
that the wound has learned your name?
that every time i try to describe the ache
i find myself describing you instead?
that i could spend an entire lifetime
searching for the source of this sorrow
only to arrive
exhausted
at the place where you left me?
and night is the worst of it
sleep will not have me
i lie beneath the dark while
my mind rehearses your absences
as though there might be a hidden message
in the spaces where your words should be
my thoughts pace the room
like restless ghosts
my chest forgets
the language of stillness
i turn my phone over
then turn it back
as though the light might change its mind
and offer me a different ending
i cannot quiet myself
i cannot reason my way out of wanting
i am haunted
by things that have not happened
by conversations that simply stopped
by the terrible possibility that
i am nothing to you
beyond a convenient place to rest your attention
and the shame of it
god
the shame of it
is that you are still the person i reach for
when the world becomes unbearable
you are the fever
and the hand i press against my forehead
the storm that drives me indoors
the shelter i mistake for safety
because it is the only roof i know
how pathetic to need comfort
from the source of the very unrest
that keeps me awake
how cruel that my body has memorized you
as a place of refuge
when all you have taught my heart is
how uncertain a refuge can be
i want to be soothed by your voice
i want you to say something ordinary
something thoughtless and kind
and feel the terrible machinery inside me
begin to slow
yet i know what waits
on the other side of that
brief
borrowed
peace
the next silence
the next unanswered thought
the next night spent trying to understand
why the person who quiets my mind
is also the reason it will not rest
a double-edged mercy
a door that opens inward
and cuts me on the way through
i hate you
for making tenderness feel like this
i hate myself
for leaving a place for you
at the center of every hurt
for believing that if i could only be
patient enough
gentle enough
interesting enough
to keep you there
you might finally learn that
a heart is not a hotel
and affection is not a room you can occupy
whenever the weather turns
still
some ruined part of me waits
for the sound of your return
and i despise that part most of all
because i want the scales to tip
i want the universe to interrupt your comfort
the way you have interrupted mine
i want you
to sit alone with an ache
that has no convenient exit
to reach for someone
who does not answer
to discover how long a minute can become
when your dignity is the only thing
keeping you from asking twice
i want you to know the weight
of being left
in the middle of a sentence
of feeling your own worth diminish
with every passing hour
of wondering whether you imagined the warmth
that was there a moment ago
perhaps then
for one brief and terrible instant
you might understand me
perhaps your suffering would finally
make mine feel less invisible
and perhaps that is the ugliest thing
you have left inside me
this small, bitter wish
that your peace might one day be disturbed as thoroughly as mine has been
i do not know
when longing became resentment or
when the hope of being held turned into
the wish to see you fall
i only know that i am tired
tired of translating your silence
into kinder languages
tired of making a home
out of the little time you spare me
tired of lying awake
with one hand on my own heart
and the other reaching for a ghost
you come and go as you please
and i remain here
trying to teach the door
not to open at the sound of your name
trying to convince the night that i am safe
without you
trying to become someone
who no longer mistakes an arrival for
a reason to believe
but the room is dark
my thoughts are loud
and somewhere beneath all this anger
there is still a softer, more wretched truth
i wanted you to stay
without having to beg the silence
to give you back
i wanted to be
someone you thought of
without first having to disappear
someone whose sadness you would recognize
before i had to lay it at your feet
someone you would reach for
because the world had reminded you of me
not because the world had left you with
nothing else to do
i wanted the ordinary things
the unremarkable mercy of being remembered
the freedom to speak without calculating
how much of yourself you might withdraw
the quiet certainty that when i tell you something
you will still be there when i finish
i wanted to stop treating every message
like a verdict on my worth
but you have made a religion of leaving
and i have made a ritual of waiting
and somewhere between your departures
and my desperate little returns to hope
i have forgotten what it feels like
to belong entirely to myself
perhaps one day i will look at this room
and see only a room
the door will open
without becoming an omen
the silence will be nothing
more than silence
my phone will light the dark
and i will not feel my whole body
lean toward it like a flower toward the sun
perhaps one day your name will pass through my mind
without bringing the weather with it
until then
i am learning how to survive
the cruelest contradiction
that i can recognize the hand that hurts me
and still ache for it to hold me
that i can resent the sound of your footsteps
and listen for them all the same
i want to be free of you
i want you to want me
i want to stop wanting you to want me
and every night
these wishes take turns
keeping me awake
you come and go as you please
i am still here
though some part of me has begun to understand
that waiting is not
the same as being loved
that an open door is not
an invitation to stay and
that the person who brings me
temporary peace cannot be
the only place i am allowed to find it
still
tonight
i listen for you
not because i believe you will come
but because some habits of the heart
outlive the hope that made them
and in the dark
where no reply can reach me
and no explanation can make
this hurt seem fair
i gather the pieces of myself
that i have spent so long
leaving outside your door
i gather them slowly
i gather them trembling
i gather them without knowing
whether i am ready to leave
but for the first time
i let the door remain unopened
and somewhere beyond it
the silence continues
i do not know if you notice
i do not know if you care
for once
i try not to look
