The sound of a warm body for a cold night
can easily be mistaken for the hum of love,
and maybe it was, for a second.
This is the story of waiting on the redline
going towards Union Station where I thought
of everything I hadn’t done today,
and a date was waiting for me at a bar
I care too much for, the bar that is.
How I misplaced a comma earlier in the day
in an email that’ll probably get me nowhere.
Or how I was running fifteen minutes late
and you killed me, or thought of killing me,
and I am easily confused between the two
these days. My skin is too alive for this
anxiety. My skin is too alive to be kissed by
nobody again. My skin, my skin, my skin:
I forget sometimes that you belong to me.
Someone once told me I was the prize, so
dip me in bronze and place me in the sun.
Someone once told me I wasn’t going crazy,
so tell that to my therapist I see once a week.
Back to the story. I was listening to the train
on the tracks and I was reminded of longing.
How I long to return home to you:
you being me. You being the monster that is
really just a person dipped in bronze reflecting
all of the light of the sun. You making sense
of the swirl of neon and ocher in your head
and figuring out what beautiful that created.
Here I am holding a smile in a photograph:
burn it. Here I am with the butterflies: clip their
wings and make me more human.
Here I am, here I am, here
I am holding myself redefining what warmth is.

***

Photo by Valou _c on Unsplash