You are a place.
I can close my eyes and stand a hundred meters from the map, and every dart i throw will hit you.
So I need something better than my own eyelids. Something I can trust better than myself.
When I loved you. It was the way a child loves a treehouse.
You were mine, and I could climb to you.
You stood in the woods behind my house. You stood underneath my window. You stood, a shadow in my bedroom door. An imprint of a nightmare I woke startled and soaked in perspiration to find gone, and left to wonder if you had ever moved at all.
I think I built you in the tree I squirmed up that late Autumn afternoon the boy and his friends threw clay and broken pieces of pottery at me during art in school that day. Their teeth were spaced in their mouths like tombstones, and their laughter echoed in their mouths like the mouths of graves.
I ran home.
I ran to the tree and climbed until I reached the highest limb, and only when I had gotten settled on that outstretched arm, did I allow myself to cry.
And you, the tree, were dead.
How could I know?
And when I cried too hard, instead of shaking off broke your arm, and down we fell.
I barely had time to catch my breath, before we hit the ground. You shattered all around me, and I lay on top of your splinters and laughed until my sides ached and my head felt light and clear. The bars of afternoon sunlight as firm as gold around us made a gilded cage.
When I loved you. It was the way a girl loves a boy she doesn't know.
Someone she's never had the courage to speak to, let alone let know her.
I wrote your name and drew your eyes on everything
in eyeliner
in chalk
in charcoal
never in anything that couldn't be washed away.
I wore a lot of black, and I covered my bed in christmas lights, and I sang about you, and I wrote about you, and I breathed when I thought you were breathing, and I told you all my secrets, and I knew you'd find me when you found me, and I could wait, until I couldn't possibly wait any longer, and then I gave up I gave up I gave up
on it all.
Then I didn't love you for a while.
I felt you retract.
I felt your absence the way a loss is absorbed into the blood. Slowly. Fearfully. Ferociously angry at myself for turning away.
I built and tore down a hundred sand castles.
I wrote letters to no one and left them all over the world.
I drank with strangers because I thought if their faces blurred enough maybe they'd look like someone I could recognize.
I lay out at night in the desert under the stars and wondered if anything would ever grow in me again. I wondered if I were petrifying, slowly, into a fossil, perfectly preserved with all my memories, and no more bloody, pulpy, breathy tomorrows.
I hurled myself into the hearts of jade green waves and tried to drown you out of me. And the ocean made my face into the sand and I ate it, the humility, the dirt, the shame, and came up gasping.
I lost myself in trees the size of dinosaurs.
I threw my body against cliffs with faces like judges.
I ripped the map to pieces and ate some of them, burned others, left some as tips in coffee shops.
I covered the globe in clues.
So you would find me.
...but you didn't look.
I came home.
When I realized I still loved you.
When I realized there was nothing out there that could help me be better.
And when I called, and you didn't come.
When I screamed and pleaded and begged and used every phone number and called the police to report the lack of the intruder-
When I opened my bedroom window and sent out the paper airplane with an entreaty written in blood-
And you still didn't come.
I fell asleep underneath it all,
I wait
to wake
to your shadow
at the door.
11-14-12 J. Mann
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