Grief Written

 I've been thinking a lot of when I drove to see you. When my parents called I had just crossed the Arizona border, and my mouth began to form the lie when I could feel the shrug in my breath. "I had to do it. I had to try." So I did. I poured gas into my car and drove. The hotel was rundown and had a permanent layer of dirt. You leaned against your car and I was caught in my words. Inside you hovered above me while I stared at the ceiling and you brushed my hair away from my face and asked me why. I didn't have an answer and searched the cracked ceiling.  I could feel my lip quivering and my throat tightening.  There was a softness in your touch, your words. You told me never again, that you loved me, that it would all work out. And I thought, this is forgiveness. This is repentance.  I felt a holiness in the way you held me. I sacrificed myself right there on the mountain top, the bed an altar beneath us. But then I drove all those hours alone back over the Arizona...

He and I were going to paint the kitchen yellow. I thought about that last night while I was thinking of you and the way your shoulders sloped like hills and valleys. The way I would kiss them while you were sleeping soundly beside me, back turned. I wondered why you always slept with your back to me. I remembered one time where you had fallen asleep holding me while watching a movie late in my apartment one night on the thirteenth floor. I had gotten up to brush my teeth and by the time I returned you had already turned away and the spot we were intertwined was warm. You and I were going to build a library with shelves to the ceiling and a fireplace because my feet are always cold and two desks with their back to each other so we could work quietly like we used to with me cross legged on your bed pressed into the corner and you at the desk. Was my presence enough? Could you feel me in the room or when I was sleeping beside you? You didn't feel the need to envelop me in every room ...