Persephone Plummeting

I never understood until you.
I couldn’t fathom why people wanted to spend nights together. 
It used to always be a race to get out unscathed before the sun showed up;
Extricate before everyone involved sobered up and
I had to pretend I hadn’t just used them
Or been used.
I never had the urge to be the last and first thing seen,
To bridge the gap between the p.m. and the a.m.
Then it clicked.
Slowly,
Because that’s how things work with me when I don’t want to admit to them, but
Suddenly I find myself wondering about your sleepy sounds,
The peaceful repose before the senses are in full swing.
I wonder how easily we’d find a comfortable position to sleep while staying entwined.
Who would be the first to fall asleep mid-sentence,
Would there be sleep at all?
And not once in all this wondering did I think about sex.
That’s how I knew.
It didn’t take long for that one to click.
Trouble.
And I understood it all.

I used to write, all the time. 
I had a spiral notebook for the cryptic words, and a journal for the all too honest words.  I skipped homework and note taking in lieu of expressing things I couldn’t say plainly. 
Everything was so raw, and on the surface
I had to just get it out, get it down on paper, make it sound less awful with words.
Words were my out, my savior, my escape to something that I could master.

Now I wonder when I lost that. 
When the words left me, or maybe I left them.
I just dulled myself to emotion so much that I couldn’t access it to express it.
Whenever anyone read my words I was just bombarded with questions anyways.
“Who is that about?” “What about me?”  “Why that word?” 
Who, what, where, why.
I just write the experience, not the explanation, please stop asking me.

After all the dulling, all the burying, and all the hiding,
I cannot bear to have my feelings in the open,
Even if the open is only the closed pages of a book. 
To be so exposed after a so much time mastering, of
Taming the wild impulse to just spill my feelings out in ink.
Maybe it will free me,
But what if it rips me open and I cannot stop?

I would risk it though,
I would risk being smothered in the avalanche if it meant
I felt so intensely again.
I would take the heartbreak,
The stolen smiles,
The secret pain,
The loneliness,
I would welcome it all back
If it meant I could have my words back.  

“This one was meant for you.”
You handed me the fortune from the cookie,
Beautiful things await you.

I put it on my mirror next to the picture of us
And neither has moved since.

Weeks later you wordlessly left me.
I got the letter after they had already begun to brainwash you.
Okay, no big deal, I could wait four years.

Neither of us could have known,
The only thing waiting for you
Was a scared fifteen year old with a gun,
Doing what he had been brainwashed to do.

I would never forgive you for leaving me.
I could have kept you safe.
Screw the beautiful things; I was waiting for you here,
And you just left.

When you came back it was in a box.
I couldn’t even see your face.
That perfect creation that I loved to kiss was cold,
I would never even get a last kiss because there was about six inches of wood in my way.

All I can ever do is wonder if I was the last one to cross your mind—
If I ever crossed your mind at all.
A million times over I have imagined what your last words to me would be.
I have decided the last words you handed to me will have to do;
Beautiful things await you.