STARLESS EYES

Letter to You

you

I don't think you know this, but there are times when I feel like buying a one-way ticket out of here - out of my body - out of my skin. And these days have nothing to do with you and your brilliant way of somehow always calming me with the most softest brush of your index finger. It has nothing to do with the way my heart skips a beat and I try to remember that you and I are separate beings too close to know what the difference between separate and desperate are.

No, I don't think you know this but sometimes I remember that this life that I find myself in is mine. I find myself remembering, learning, realizing that I have felt my entire life like a potted plant. My roots are trying to beat their wrists into pulp and fight the confinements that make up this cylinder of a pot.

No, I don't think you know this but sometimes I remember that I waited for you for my whole life. And I did know I was waiting. I've always been waiting. At night I would lay in bed and take a breath and that breath would echo in the caverns of my chest and in the cavities left between the ribs of my hollowed upper-body, I could feel the emptiness attempting to break my spine. I could feel my waiting in the way I would look at the ocean and could feel for an instant that there was someone somewhere who was looking at something and feeling the vastness reverberate in the stiffness of their fingers who felt the way I did.

No, I never told you but I knew it was you when you didn't take my hand that first time I laid mine on top of yours. I knew it when my anxiety was my own personal natural disaster and you played the newscast reporter, the friend, the mourner, and the victim. I knew it when you whispered my hair always smelled so sweet like if someone had drenched me in vanilla and added crushed rose petals. I knew it was you when you would tell me this on the days when I had sweat through my clothes from running from myself without ever moving a muscle. I knew it when I held your hand in mine and you were so overwhelmed by the gesture that we went into hysterics as the butterflies in our stomachs floated out of our mouths and into the air. Their iridescent wings making patterns and halos that I wish we could have held through the disaster that I was.

Most of all, though, I don't think you knew that I love you. I don't think you know this because my way of saying I love you was taking a one-way bus ticket away from your side. You don't know how many nights I stayed in crumpling hotels and in my mother's arms. You don't know how cold it is to walk out into the hot summer air wearing two sweaters and a thermal and still feel the tendrils of ice kiss your every tendon as I tried to remember that you aren't here. You don't know how long I held my fingers in the dirt of my potted being, you don't know how I threw clumps of my roots away. Or how I shoveled dirt upon dirt into my chest.

You don't know that it was always empty.

I never told you this but I love you. I love you so much I walked away. Because you cannot love someone who finds herself thinking of catching the next plane out of your life when she has a panic attack. Or the potted plant of a girl who worries she is more dirt and trapped roots than flower. You cannot love me, a girl who heard you say you loved her and left anyway.

- me

p.s. I keep you in the hole inside my chest. It is the only thing that makes it feel full.