It’s hard to explain it, how
five years ago is behind me and yet
still laps over the present, a shimmering black
wave, receding and washing forward again
up on the silver sands of my mind.
It’s hard to explain how then morphs
into now, how
the band on my finger tells me
my lover is never leaving and yet when I wake
in the early hours of the morning and
the bed beside me is empty, only
rumpled blankets and sleeping dog
my heart races backward to the 1000 plus nights
when I waited for him
to call, to text, to meet me in the field
under the moon or to simply walk by
and I was left in the dark, afraid.
Despite the pictures on the walls, your smile
moving in my phone I’m afraid
I made it all up. Made it all up and
no one is ever coming back for me.
Somehow, curled into my pillow
that feels more true.
The wave laps higher up the beach
and it’s hard to explain why the depression
has returned, why the anxiety still
squeezes my throat when it’s not all about
him anymore–at least, not exactly.
Not exactly about him but it is exactly about
all those 1000 plus nights waiting for something
that would never come, waiting
for my love to come back to me like a cosmic
boomerang because of course it would,
wouldn’t it?
I don’t know how to explain it, don’t know
what he’d say if he knew–
that just like the love never fully left me
the dark that crept into my veins in his absence
didn’t either. Don’t know
if I’d have the strength to tell him
that my body learned to attack itself
targeting my thyroid, my adrenals, my mind
forgot how to do everything but wait
wait, even though you told me not to
but love was a stronger siren.
My body took an imprint of those 1000 plus
nights, sunrises, sunsets–a marking
too permanent for medicine, a diagnosis
I’ll probably live with forever.
I don’t know how to explain it, how now
when new, sweet love has soothed so many wounds
like honey, like eucalyptus–how is it possible
that the dark ocean still laps, sometimes low until I
almost forget about it, then sometimes high,
high, too high up on my beach?
I cannot tell all the reasons. Only that love
carves the deepest scar. Only that
I still wouldn’t take any of it
back.