the space above my ears.

So Be It, Sobriquet

It's too late for me to tell you this, or anything like it, but even the leaky sink is beginning to sound like your sock-softened footsteps.

Dear Lover, as the days absent of you fall by, I find it increasingly more difficult to write sober.

One is bound to learn the ways of a thousandth priority when they are always treated like one, and I find this lifestyle is a hard habit to shake.

You told me goodbye while I wasn't looking, already halfway off the ground, I didn't see it coming.

You watched me grow smaller and smaller among all the little identical houses like a wedding ring tumbling down an air vent until it's too far into the darkness to see.

I have long made peace with the loss. 

However, there is something I have found to be missing from me, and there its a creeping, prickly sense of dread that you have taken it.

It is not the ring, but something that is explicitly and exclusively of and belonging to me.

You get a souvenir, I get a perpetual bruise and the hole your dog tore in my sleeve, show me how that's fair.

Unconsciously, I yearn for something to keep and a primal urge within me refuses to rest until I find it.

I see you, your body, and all I can think is I've held what's under those clothes.

I see you in a new dark grey jacket and immediately wonder where you got it from, why you're not wearing the yellow one that makes your cheeks look rosy

Then I think about it too much and realize I'm not sure if the yellow jacket is yours or mine, and that is the reason you wear grey.

There are many roads home, but which one will get you there with all of yourself, no pieces lost along the way?

I have yet to form a conclusion; I thought the sunflower road that led me here was the one,

However, upon closer observation, the butterflies here are moths and there are rivers of crimson pouring down the great stems of every flower, painting the petals the color of fire.

Since my arrival, I have begun to run out of time.

I'm running out of time and I'm running out of things to say.

I haven't been outside in a while, perhaps that's the problem.

Too scared to leave the confines of this place, this house that feels more alive than we do.

I spend all the time I can remember trying to write out a cure for the change in you, that and triple-checking all the locks.

I can't leave this place, I need it to protect me from the outside,

But I need you too, I need you to protect me from this house and the things inside.

There's been a shift, you're never home, I have to rap my knuckles raw to draw you out of these walls.

Even then, you're hardly here.

I'm losing focus and control, I keep miscounting the windows, always having to remind myself there's always been only two there.

The curtains are ancient, but this place ages them by the hour.

The door handles are all uncomfortably cold, all brass where they used to be spruce.

A pebble sends the doves all scattering, and I see there were never any leaves in the trees. I am not losing my sanity.

We planned to paint the cabinet doors evergreen.

We left a space in the living room where we could roll up the carpet and dance if we were just tipsy enough, although it was more like a rhythmic, swaying embrace when we did it.

We nailed photos onto the wall, feeling the bones of the house break under the force of the hammer, making it our own.

You left me with all this.

Tell me what to do with it.