I’ve only seen him
14 days this year.
We’ve been a thousand miles apart for months, and I see him
in photographs he sends me, bottle of vodka in his hand again,
the beginning of another depressive episode, but why should I care? I seem to be thriving on my own without the shattered glass of a vodka bottle sinking into my skin, breaking me open like his wounds that never healed. But I hardly believe I am some days because the pavement I walk upon smells like him, the same walkways to my classrooms stained by his presence. The same dorms we used to joke smelled like weed and piss in the stairwells, and now I stand before them,
alone,
trying to relieve myself of him.
I can’t see myself
with him in 14 years.
So I sit at the windowsill, headphones tuned to guided meditation.
I try to remind myself that I’m a thousand miles away
from dishonesty, a man who has touched my body raw
and left me here. I’ve begged him to stop burying his mind
in an alcoholic stupor, but now I don’t even care.
He’ll never be mine again.
All I can hear is a woman’s soft spoken voice
reminding me to breathe:
“You are at peace.”
I watch the leaves die from where I sit,
their falling a soft breaking, the ache
before the green returns.
I tell myself that I’ve outgrown him, but fuck, he still lingers
on my tongue.
Maybe this is what growth was always supposed to look like:
jagged and sour, like the flesh of rotting fruit;
a hunger that never softens.
