plethora

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i feel like a broken plate. 

i feel like the doctor who walks in, head down, clipboard to chest, to say, "he didn't make it." 

my lungs are paper bags pressed to the lips of a panic attack and i'm trying, oh god, i'm trying to teach them how to be lungs again. 

there are hands on my body. there's a mouth somewhere saying my name like a greek tragedy and i want to tell them that i am not creon. i am not oedipus, but here i am gouging my eyes out with my hands. 

and the truth is that i still love you and that feeling is like nothing else when it meets loss. imagine cloth bunched up in fists. imagine screaming. imagine a body curled up into itself like a question mark asking why. 

why. 

the plate falls and breaks in slow motion. freeze the frame. play it again. stop. look at all the cracks. okay, rewind. stop. look, it was completely fine just a few seconds ago. 

i still love you. 

a glass tips over the edge of a wet counter and shatters, too. as it does, it looks like rain. remember the first time we kissed in the rain? 

the whole house is shaking. i'm shaking. my mom always said that in the event of an earthquake, to take your most important thing with you and hide. a light bulb explodes. i-i can't find your hands. 

i don't know if you've seen them, but there are all these skeletons of dead lovers intertwined with each other in the world. some are locked in an embrace. some are holding hands. 

a plate falls. a glass tips over. in the middle of a day, there's a doctor somewhere with bad news. and there's a body in the rubble. there's a body in the rubble.