This Time of Year

I think of you often,
sunlight on your skin,
glinting off of the most beautiful stomach
I have ever seen.
I see glowing windows around us
on at least three sides,
and I can still smell the product
in that rock star fauxhawk that I loved so much,
and I wonder:
How could I have gone
so very far astray?

There were nights
(and i know, now, there's nothing that compares)
with bottles of cheap red wine
in dark green bottles,
picked solely on the merits of label design
late nights stretched out like melting taffy
on a crimson couch,
watching Harry Potter, singing Leonard Cohen,
revelling in our mutual mania.
Waking up
with bedhead type A,
(the bedhead of "traditional sleep")
or bedhead type B
("hip rolling, lips parting,
oh sweet jesus the nieghbors might call the cops
i screamed so loud" bedhead).
What sort of fool
tosses that aside
like nothing, like fingernail clippings,
like drier lint
for dilated pupils, and shaking hands,
for a short straw
and a pile of the white?

I know
it's getting warm now in Arkansas.
I can feel the humidity on my bare, broad shoulders
even from 2000 miles away.
We would've had beers
on the front porch swing
while watching the light dim,
throwing darts, holding hearts
talking about someday,
thinking about always.

I hope you know.

That.
Is what I saw in you.

I saw forever and a day,
the two of us- old women running 5ks,
family vacations and higher education.
Perhaps a child,
and showers togehter
every single morning until infinity.

And here's what you should know.

Sometimes I still do.

There are a thousand images
that cut me to the core,
a thousand memories,
and each one cuts like a knife.
I remember the two of us together,
dappled with soap suds,
and loss sears my eyes.
I sing alone
songs we will never sing together again,
windows down, hands catching the wind,
and the word regret
burns across my heart.


I still see all those things.
I see how they slipped away,
and I curse the mind
(all my own)
that told me to live
like I had nothing to lose,
that left us friends at best,
speaking only to the surface of things,
while just below the water of everyday,
remorse pours into my lungs.