no place to go

I have to tell you –

I would give anything to see you again.

You are magic,

the likes of which I have never known

and may never know again.

I find myself in moments

where I hardly remember

the cadence of your voice,

the crinkles around your eyes

as you smile.

But night falls, and I fall too,

fast and hard into

clear and vivid dreams of you.

You speak, and I fold towards the sound.

Yearning awakened beneath an understanding moon,

I live the lives I never had with you.

Sometimes, I trip backwards into time.

Back to crisp mornings, quiet in your car.

Train on the radio before

a grueling walk uphill.

And I find myself on the bleachers,

lazily following the rhythm of your arm

and a tennis ball that comes again and again –

trusting each swing will bring another,

and knowing this, too, is a piece of eternity.

Sometimes, I look down at my white dress –

and wonder if I’ll ever get the petrol stain out

before realizing it doesn’t matter.

Because right now, we are so terribly

stupid and giddy and courageous,

to wade waist deep into the ocean,

lit only by the moon, as we whisper

the shameful things we could never say

beneath an unforgiving sun.

Sometimes I look over my shoulder,

and I see you again,

finger pointing at me across the store.

Your smile, so bright, so open, it hurts.

and my heart thinks, this is happiness.

We wiggle as we pull the store shutters close,

and I let myself tip backwards into the water,

knowing I’ll float lightly above a darkening blue,

peacefully beneath an endless sky.

My phones pings, and it’s a text-

a text from you,

quiet and tender, a soothing soft

to the blackening ache I feel.

How do I tell you that

you saved my life again and again,

and I did nothing but savor yours?

Who am I to you now,

but a distant memory.

While you remain forever,

a fixture in my dreams,

a memory in my depths –

cherished, held, preserved.

My love for you

has no place to go –

no hope of emancipation.

I miss you.

No, that’s not right.

You are missing from me.

I think perhaps you always were.

I search for you everywhere

and remain still in my longing.

So I find myself here

again and again and again.

So I have to tell you -

I would give anything,

anything

to see you again.

Eternally in a state of missing someone, I try to capture what it feels like to be in a state of chronic longing. Amidst the feeling that something (or someone) is always missing from me, I also try to grasp the feeling of being alive. Once upon a time, everyone I loved was within a 20 minute a drive of me. As my world opened up , my relation to the world, to new experiences, to new people became more visceral, beautiful, and flooded with the feeling of being alive. There is a pain in having the people missing from your life, but there is also a great and tragic joy in the experiences that brought you to them and bring you back to them again and again and again.

The title is an homage to a poem by Ted Berrigan.