I couldn’t see it until I packed up my things, taped up the last of the boxes,

Suddenly the only thing tying me to my hometown was a memory of a boy long gone.

(grown into the shadow of a man)

I said goodbye to the trees in my rearview mirror and then all at once I saw it all a little clearer.

(hollow trees of sacrifice and disease)

Five years sitting patiently, thinking that gold string still tied us together,

(would you go back and change it if you could)

Cut with a knife, ‘no reason to come back now’ etched into the metal.

(what has the world ever done to me / my love, it has stolen me)

As I turn my back on the town that raised me, I see the mountains painted in violet tragedy as the sun sets on childhood memory

And I can’t help but think, if, in a hundred years they’re still reading my words,

Will they know you? Will they wonder about the boy made of sunshine smiles and summertime sadness?

If they remember my name will they remember yours?

Hand in hand. 

Beatrice, Beatrice.

The one that got away, the one I couldn’t keep, the one that didn’t stay.

Have I immortalized my own tragedy? Do these poems paint a heartbreak Pompeii?

Sonnet 1 through 154;

A hundred years from now will they read my diary to learn your name?

Clever boy, whip-smart with a midsummer night’s grin,

You were never Romeo, were you?

Rosaline, Rosaline.

How you have outrun my tragedy.

Of all the things to remember, your face, I think, is the cruelest. I still feel the ghost of your hand in mine.

You’re a tattoo on my mind (though there’s nothing beautiful about a heart holding on to a ‘the end’).

I wonder, would Orpheus have been better off if he’d never tried to follow Euridice?

You would have to tell me—I never learned how to walk away,

My head’s been turned over my shoulder since the moment I was born.

I think ‘us’ will only die with the death of me. (What a painful wait that will be.)

These letters are addressed to the river. I cross my fingers though I know they’re not delivered (back to December. To the love of my life).

I bleed grief onto cobweb coated memories / this fuzzy playback is all the proof of you and me / a polaroid picture burned at the edges / my sadness aches inside me with a heartbeat of its own / there are still shallow promises of what you owe to me / did you think that you would marry me / I thought that I would marry you / thought we were for forever / thought wrong / thought again / still can’t think any better

An ocean between us / the tsunami comes rushing in / not a day has passed / I miss you like air, like sound, like silence / northstar, homecoming, heartbeat / you have peeled back my skin and laid my soul bare / only to find that there is nothing there / I handed myself to you all those years ago when I told you to go / and you’ve carried me with you / through tundra and rain / through all your wreckage and pain / did it keep you steady / did it keep you sane / I left myself in your hands / and I have yet to learn / how to pull myself back into my skin / out of the grip of our childhood tragedy / how cruel you must be / your voice calls me home / but the locks have been changed / my loneliness does not ache the same / the tsunami comes rushing in / there are oceans between us

I do not think there will ever come a day I do not miss you / that is love I think / to leave someone and find that five years later you are still carrying them with you / to halve your hearts and stitch them together into a whole that is forged (rather than born) / I am in you as you are in me / no matter the time or the distance between / there is magic to be found in these living memories

Sometimes I wonder if all I am is a love letter returned to sender.

And now I must consider, will they know in a hundred years or so if these letters reached you after all?

When ‘the end’ hit that final page did you still think there was more to say? Did you ever think of following me into Hades?

Was I a photo album packed and gone? Did you keep me in your attic, a ghost to remind you of all the pain you lived through?

Or did you throw me out with the Wordsworth roses? Put me in the box I made, light the match on Brutus’ back?

Did you cry, “et tu, Brute?” 

Did those five years feel like longing or did they feel like freedom?

Does my name leave a taste under your tongue? Like an empire turned to ruin. Do the ashes of forever climb into your veins?