nostalgia smells like sterile love and kindred feeling whippling in the air
like, before what we knew it was like to be apart,
it seemed to mean every moment together
oranges are sweet in the winter
my hand smells like oranges, I think. I am sitting in the library surrounded by many voices and people’s laughter, some distractions around but nothing is quite as distracting from my work than the thought of these oranges – it’s a sweet smell, reminds me of sticking a thumb in through the peel as you try to take it off with one hand like I once challenged you to do, and then holding that hand, fingers blurring together and apart.
Should I be surprised that this has continued for many weeks now?
But as always, you are gentle. With rejection, with love, with passion that flies under the radar until someone asks you about it and let it all go off. I wonder how much tension you are holding in your mind and body, how much of it goes unacknowledged, and how much of it you might want someone to ask you about.
pools
“Here we are.”
I gasped for a bit of breath as I took my final stride up the hill. It wasn’t really one of exasperation, just unatheleticness (I remember the last time I ran a mile– it was freshman year gym and the only bad grade that tainted my line of As).
“Are you okay?”
We made eye contact for the first time in 30 minutes. My eyes had been set on the dirt that moved beneath my feet, or the dirt that I moved over, whichever it was. Now i faced pools of blue, against more of the same.
“You haven’t said anything this whole time.”
I didn’t move. My face made no adjustments. I stood and I drowned.
“Okay, then.”
We broke our shared gaze. I jumped out of the pools and found myself gasping for air again.
I loved every indentation you made in my impressionable heart
Because it meant you were becoming
a part of me
I wish I had heard something
The words you didn’t say to me
Sounded like
The most beautiful poem
Ever written
My lips are chapped
And my mouth is sore
My eyes are wet
But maybe that’s okay since
I have no more
kisses left to give
I’m just afraid that
if I keep fighting for you hell or high water,
eventually I’m going to drown.