It’s nice not to wake up 
From a song rising above the shower 
Your voice weaving through steam 
Spilling a song I never liked

I enjoy the taste of coffee 
When I have the first and last cup 
There’s no one here to lecture me 
On why Calvin needed Hobbes

I never dream about your hands 
Like I did when you’d be late to bed 
And without your absence wrapped around me
I’ve never been so warm

And when people ask how life is 
Without You 
It is the only haunting reminder 
That you are not in my shower 
At my kitchen table 
Or between my sheets

Because I have removed you every way I could

But you are still in 
Their questions

I don’t like thinking about loss in terms of people, because you don’t lose people. You don’t misplace them, or find them sitting under your bed or in some random kitchen drawer when you finally remember where you left them. They’re never lost; they walk away, they accidentally drift in a different direction, they die. Loss also implies possession. I’ve never owned a person; I’ve only been given their time. Time is irrevocable. I’d rather give someone a piece of myself than give them my time, because if someone says you can’t take that piece back, they’re lying. You can go ahead and take it back, lock it up in the box you got it from, and never let them see it again. Or you can grow up, so much so that the piece becomes irrelevant, and they can’t prove it was ever a part of you in the first place. But if you have been given someone’s time, you have it forever. That quote was right, I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I thought about you when I “lost” you. I hope you value your time more than that, because it was only after it was too late that I realized I shouldn’t have ever wasted it on missing you.

To fall out of love.

To give yourself immensely to a person, and to open up the cavity of your chest and realize you have an organ instead of a mechanical, blood-pumping contraption.

To transform your eyes from two clumps of vessels into spherical windows, and to allow a person- the right person- to look into them and see completely through to you.

To actively feel the tectonic plates shifting below your feet, and to realize with utter certainty that you are in transit, moving somewhere else. 

To change your mind.

If you think about the physicality of love, how is it possible to fall out of a place you fell into? When you fall into love, are you falling downwards from some great height, and landing softly into a lower, uncharted, fragile place? When you fall out of love, are you falling yet again, crashing with a thud into a familiar, but different lonely territory? The words confuse me; with falling, falling, falling, never walking or running or taking a leap of faith. I don’t ever want to fall for a person; I want to move purposefully, knowing it’s worth the risk.

But to stop loving you, no matter what my method of action: the girl I am now could not stop loving the boy you are now. One of us will have to change.

This is one of the most fucked up things I’ve ever thought.

When I was in my senior year of high school, we read a book about literary analysis, and one of the chapters was called something like “It’s Never Just Heart Disease.” I wish I still had the book, but it was loaned to a friend of a friend, lost in the abyss of infinite borrowing. The author was saying that if you give a character a disease, it represents something else. Heart disease is the inability to love; brain cancer is a loss of thought; and on and on it goes. He went on to say how inaccurate this logic would be in understanding illnesses in real life, and that we were at the mercy of science and not a crazed author with a pen in his hand.

When they diagnosed me with the scarring on my eyes (and before I found out how serious the injury actually was, and what it could lead to), for a brief moment I thought back to that chapter and felt illuminated. It’s the moment when you’re reading and a table suddenly represents more than a table, and the bulb in your head is lit up by the realization of what it all means. And with my eyes, I was thankful to have evidence. The things I saw when I was younger- uncharacteristic, sometimes tragic things- were now manifested by scars; and I was flawed, but at least I knew it. It was physical and emotional alignment. If the universe was conscious, it was permission that yes, what happened to me was wrong. Here are the scars to prove it. I was a walking poem, a girl with experiences as easy to understand and analyze as a character from a novel. I was anatomical literature; scarred up, but understood.

I’m scarred because I was misdiagnosed. That brief connection with what I read and what I felt is something I’m ashamed of, because illness is nothing to fall in love with, or feel free because of. When my sight was permanently restored, I didn’t allow myself the indulgence of creating a metaphor, or of saying something stupid like how I could finally truly see again. Maybe there was one point in time when I was constantly searching for answers, but now there is no part of me that wants to ask those questions. Why did these things happen? It doesn’t matter. Even if there was a reason, I’m not sure I would care to know. Science is cold and clinical, and I am artless.