This Was Always a Love Poem Until You Read It

This is a triptych of poems — three tonal interpretations of the same emotional imprint. Each version explores how grief shifts shape depending on the angle of memory: absurd, analytical, or tender.

I wrote them together, but they speak differently. Think of them as parallel universes of the same goodbye.

We Both Forgot the Safe Word Was Nebraska

I was a silverfish

curled in the spine of your favorite book.

You read me anyway.

Said:

“This footnote bites back.”

***

You left your copy of Dharma Bums

in my freezer.

Said it was the coldest place

you could think of.

I thought maybe you were trying to preserve something.

Or sabotage my frozen peas.

***

You always smelled like thunderstorms

and pencil shavings.

I wrote a song about that once.

It was mostly humming

and the sound of me not texting you back.

***

You said your bathtub had a personality.

I said my shadow filed for emancipation.

Somewhere in the middle,

you kissed me

while a silverfish ate half the poem.

We called it Tuesday.

***

And your breath had

that Tuesday apocalypse scent —

burned circuits, wet pennies,

and a whisper of static

like the universe clearing its throat

before confessing.

***

You blinked,

and I time-traveled

three seconds into your mouth.

I nested behind your molars.

You hummed in C minor.

It was disgusting. I adored it.

***

You bought me a grapefruit

and carved your initials into the rind

with a key that once opened

your ex-girlfriend’s birdcage.

She never had a bird.

That was a metaphor.

Everything was.

***

We fell asleep

in a pile of not-quite-sincere apologies

and three unpaid parking tickets.

Harold, the Polaroid of your ankle,

watched over us like a saint

with no miracles to offer.

***

We had a date once

to reorganize your regrets alphabetically.

Got stuck somewhere between

“biting the dentist”

and

“leaving early from my birthday.”

I still think you should’ve stayed.

***

We touched foreheads.

The wallpaper peeled.

My left earlobe caught fire.

Yours glowed faintly

like a lie you forgot to regret.

***

I mailed you a shadow of myself

in an envelope that tasted like library dust.

You replied “cool” in lowercase.

I sobbed for four minutes and two decades.

***

I wanted to be the thing

you didn’t return to the library.

The overdue fine

you were willing to pay.

****

Sometimes I dream

I’m a VHS tape in your glove compartment.

Melted.

Loved once.

Unspooled across a state line

neither of us remember crossing.

***

I made you a mixtape

of modem screeches, night bus sighs,

and the sound your wrist makes

when you twist open truth.

***

I keep finding your voice

in things that don’t deserve it:

a voicemail from a pharmacy,

a potato chip shaped like Vermont,

my own mouth when I talk to strangers

and use your cadence

without meaning to.

***

Your voicemail still thinks I’m important.

I left it a haiku about elbow dimples.

It hasn’t called me back.

***

Sometimes, I hallucinate

the way you tied your shoes —

double knots like you didn’t trust the world

not to trip you.

You used to say

existence was just falling forward

and hoping someone catches your elbow.

I tried.

I swear I tried.

***

You whispered:

“I love you like a basement flood.”

And I,

silverfish with no eyelids,

believed you with every segment of my idiot body.

Merciful Permutation

there is no clean experiment

for collapse.

variables unmeasured, hypotheses unsaid,

mass converging with mass, inertia dissolving

where the laws fracture

softly.

***

absence is not silence

but residual noise,

the murmur of abandoned machinery

lodged behind my left eye,

persistent as background radiation,

a phantom frequency threading through the waveform.

the particle never wholly escapes the chamber.

***

uncertainty blooms

not whether you departed

but whether i dispersed

across probability’s blurred horizon,

a diffusion mistaken for decision,

the illusion of agency

folding back on itself.

***

sometimes i summon

the supermarket version of us,

one of countless small eternities.

you, fingers brushing the fruit’s luminous skin,

haloed beneath indifferent fluorescents.

i, still watching you

as gravity tilts again,

the familiar constriction rising in my throat

like a rehearsed catastrophe.

***

the poem urged me to begin again,

to incinerate the record,

but ash persists.

even carbon carries

the memory of its fire.

***

there was never a door

only membranes —

thin, trembling partitions

between what was and what still mimics its shape.

call it superstition

or entropy

or the experiment that outlived its hypothesis.

***

i surrendered my orbit,

my spin,

my fixed coordinates,

my diminishing velocity,

until i dissolved

into the soft noise of margins,

ghost data

adrift beyond the frame.

***

i once vowed

to love you through anything.

i only failed

to fathom

the completeness of anything.

***

somewhere,

in a more merciful permutation,

we remain in that fluorescent hush.

your hand lifts the fruit.

mine reaches for you.

our eyes meet briefly,

soft and certain,

before gravity forgets us

once more.

You Are the Freckle Map My Paralysis Traces

I try to call you with my fingers

but they’ve turned to chalk outlines.

My jaw hums like a fridge

in a condemned motel

where no one ever dreams of me.

***

The hoodie-monster braids my hair

with threads of static and unfinished apologies.

She smells like you did

after thunderstorm walks —

minus the kindness,

plus vinegar and stolen mail.

***

Your freckles were geography.

The one on your clavicle was a country I defected from.

The one behind your knee a crater where I buried sound.

The one beneath your eye was the X on the map

where my breath gave up.

***

I once kissed your shoulder

like it was an oath.

Now I kiss the air

where your name might have floated —

if names could float

and I hadn’t forgotten yours

in every language except skin.

***

My body won’t move.

It replays the last time you laughed

and files it under “Evidence.”

I try to classify the ache

but it bleeds into every field —

biology, mythology, exit strategies.

***

The demon stares with your pupils.

She points at my chest and says,

“There. That’s where we’re haunting tonight.”

I want to say your name.

Instead, I count freckles on her arms

and pretend she’s just a badly-cast understudy.

***

She pulls the sheets tight

like it’s ritual.

My breath fogs the window

in the shape of a maybe.

She writes no with her fingertip.

***

I am a map.

You were the wind.

Now I am folded wrong —

creases where there should be rivers,

blank space where the legend should be.

***

And the freckle constellation fades

like memory passed through smoke.