Where Hearts Get Left

This is what San Francisco feels like when the fog rolls in after a hot day. The first flourishes of cold wisp against warmed skin, a heavy mist that feels like a spreading smile. The fondness grows and the late fall heat wave falls into infamous steam.

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I want to wait with you at bus stops

I want to lean on you in the rain

I want you to be mine and me to be yours

I want everything, again

Follow me down steep stairways

Crash into heavy sheets

Run past familiar haunts

Trip down those winding streets

Take everything unbroken

Build new but with a simpler core

Laugh every single day

Make the stuffs of lore

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The fog blows on now, rolling and rocking over green hills, whispering through pine trees, leaving sparkling condensation on these heavy rocks. The sidewalks slick, the streets slicker under taxi cab wheels, a great whir and swish about the city blankets our hearts and clouds most judgment.

And We Jump

We jump bravely into rolling waves to find little more than soft sand scraping our knees. We smile as salt-water sprays up, white foam gives way to clear blue and we are whole again. We bob as buoys, farther out than the child in us would want to be, we bob as buoys tied together and laugh. The soothing, the cajoling, the rolling rocking of each set pushes us in and yet back out again, time is kept by each wave’s peak and yet not kept at all. Push off rough pillows of sand and find a floating feeling not unlike walking on the moon. Jump and fall easily, smile, drip, with salt and laughter. 

The Brief Moments Wherein I Might Have Loved You

We became fast friends in one night and as I lay completely clothed between you and our mutual best friend I drunkenly dreamt, “ I could love him.”

I arranged for us to meet to play arcade games once a week. You taught me to shoot deer and as I cocked the plastic gun with one hand I glared, “I could love him.”

We drank into the wee hours of the morning until I fell on your bed and you ran around town with the clink of spray paint and laughter. Though the drunken mistiness I pondered, “I could love him.”

We rolled naked in sheets and thought no one would know that when I looked at you across the kitchen every cell was smiling, “I could love him.”

Adventure after adventure we fell into a common companionship, when I looked you were there, when I needed you were there and when I laughed you were there, but I never let myself love you completely. The arm’s length that I kept you at then pushed you further into, onto someone else stretched us too far. And now I love you and it’s too late.

The Shorts and Long Of It

Even in the heat the rain feels cool on my skin, like your touch, it’s a dichotomy. The sky cracks and my shoes squeak, I walk slower. I turn up my face and close my eyes, senselessly I walk through the parking lot. Thoughts of you weigh on my mind lightly, intermittently as warm raindrops

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 I am so close. I feel almost full. Just barely at capacity for love, love of the earth and its many wonders, love of my friends and their endless hope, love for those wretches that I have left and those yet to come, love for all these things and the possibility of a love I know not yet and cannot fathom. This is a teetering on drugless ecstasy and if I can fall forward I will float on clouds.

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 I think about the moment you held my hand under the table and smiled at me. To date I don’t think I’ve ever felt that much electricity, unless I can’t remember touching my tongue to a socket. We ate everything and talked about anything, we drank vodka and I didn’t even remember I had a cell phone much less look at it. I was lost with you and I still am every time I think of this moment. What changed? How did we untangle?

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 There’s something to be said for silence. A thought lingers in silence and changes like wisp of smoke waiting and wanting for the next sound to be made. The thought shifts to contemplate the silence and thus the silence becomes the thought.

The Same, More of Exactly the Same

You don’t get to come in here anymore, in fact you should have never been here to begin with, but you pushed in, opened doors with your smile and sweet, albeit few words. I was transfixed and fell under your spell, quickly. You had to have known, had to have seen as I fell, floated beneath you. Everyone said don’t go, it’s slippery down there but I went and I slid and slipped and now, now your smile still transfixes me in a way that makes me cry when I get home. Along the way I lost my power and as I grapple to climb out of this muck, every time I hear from you I fall a little deeper. Sinking slowly into the quicksand of unrequited like. I try to stand on the shoulders of others that mean little to nothing just to feel closer to you. I’m sure you don’t notice, you shouldn’t, for I am not alone in this quest. I am not the first and will certainly not be the last in this abyss of warm memories that you have all but forgotten. I think back to a time where you rested your head on my stomach or stroked my leg as I packed to leave you in the early city fog. You broke me, broke into the chasm that I had kept locked so tightly. I had no intention of any of this to occur and here I use the same words to describe the same thing I said I would forgo weeks ago. Here the very same meanings are mixed and jumbled to describe the simplest of things; mild heartbreak. As if such a thing as heartbreak could ever be mild.