Remember when you said you ‘loved me a little less’ and all I felt in the days that followed was jagged icebergs pulling my soul down the deepest caverns? What I mean to say is that I’ve never been this empty and adrift when you found promise in a new horizon I couldn’t sail to. What I mean to say is that some sizable chunk of me has been seized by the riptide and I am still learning to fill in this space with anything else but the sound of your distant voice. What I mean to say is that in the cruelest parts of the night I still feel you’ve gone where I could no longer reach you – even as you’re here tracing constellations on my skin – that you were so close to choosing what’s past that horizon – even as you had chosen instead to turn your boat to sail back toward my lonely island – that I won’t ever be okay, not completely, having known a path I could have walked alone. What I mean to say is: I ask for patience when the mind goes dark and the words become frightful because there is no forgetting that, somehow, in some way, you had loved me a little less.
