I want to tell him
I want to say, ‘I have loved you since the day that I met you’
Bloody knees on pavement,
Bloody knuckles against that drunk frat boy’s jaw.
You carried me when I was five and broke my leg
Now I carry you when you’re twenty-two and broke your heart.
‘Fragile’ is stamped across your forehead
She should’ve handled you with care.
Ice cream in your living room at 3am,
Locked in the high school gym until five
Driving down dimly lit roads with no one else on them
Just us and the fireflies in the neighbor’s cornfield
expired cigarettes, believing we’d never be older than eighteen,
Yelling at the stars, encouraging constellations to find new places in the sky,
pinky promising that the world would never pull us apart,
swearing by the paper planes that would take us across the ocean.
‘I have loved you since the day I met you
Because you made this place home.’
I wanted to tell him all of that
But when I opened my mouth
I could not push the words past my tongue,
Caught in my throat like a sailor’s knot
While the rest of me was unraveling