love letters

My skin is marked with our stories.

The night we met I crashed my bicycle, my knees thick with gravel, skin sandpapered by the parking lot. You poured water over my legs, cleaning out the dirt, drawing out the pain until I laughed, until I stopped thinking with my body.

The day at your childhood home when we climbed the treehouse. Rough-hewn, uneven boards grown coarse and dry under the touch of the sun. The splinter in my fingertip, the warmth of your mouth as you kissed it, tried to coax out this sliver of hurt. How we looked at it afterwards, such a small thing for such a sharp pain. I wished it were alive. I wished it could grow into a tree for us.

The crooked scar on my arm where the tag on the dog's collar caught, dug a furrowed line into my skin. We did nothing about it, distracted by the dog, getting him into your car. He was nervous, didn't know us, didn't know we were opening our lives and carving into them to make spaces for him. In bed, you noticed the bandage on my arm, asked, "How did that happen?" Fingers running over it, your warmth sapping away the sting.

The weariness that followed illness. I was spent, worn. A shadow of your wife, haunting your home. You brought me leaves and flowers from the outside, stories of small miracles you caught in your palm, poured into my mouth like broth. I drank from your life, and embers I thought long dark came alight inside me.

The hollow in my chest that matches yours, the uneven pieces of ragged heart we exchanged. They don't fit right, they do strange things, pulling back to their proper bodies. When I see you I am drawn, half a heart not my own yearning to be whole, gravity redirecting into you. A force I cannot control, the empty silhouettes we try to fill from the past. Every ache now a memory, a love letter you've written on my skin.