I don’t know how to explain this but many a time —and this was when it started to happen more often, I left my body and I went into the blue.

In the blue you felt nothing, be nothing. It was just dark and quiet and you’re gone. Sometimes, you could feel yourself breathing but it was nothing, you became nothing.

And sometimes you came back and you were so shocked for being gone that long that you caught your breaths so erratically that it might cause you, and those around you (if anyone was there at all), to feel panic.

But I was calm this time. When I came back to catch my breath it wasn’t erratic, it was silent like death.

You were there and you too were silent, like death.

Your hand, moving a little bit faster, to clean, to wipe, to wash. To make everything gone, dissolve into the water, the bluest I’ve seen.

And I remember you said, “it’s going to be okay.”

It’s been quiet for a while now.

1997

i was fifteen and my hair was big as cotton candy coming warm out of a spinner, my first

boyfriend played the violin, he was
a baby cute baby, we wrote each other letters with tiny

hearts and songs, i ripped them to shreds. see, i had a thing for the boy with the guitar, it’s complicated

he sang a letter to elise at graduation, i found
his girlfriend’s diary in my locker somehow —he winked

at me from the stage.

(you were eighteen, running and kicking, athletic not yet poetic—-falling in love, breaking apart… the thing goes long for life, i would hear about it one night, late into the evening. my hair not so big then.)

he comes fast and early, but lingers longer
he doesn’t know

he could be suave, serene a quietude
he doesn’t know

she’s been writing goodbyes since Christmas
he doesn’t know

he is the writer of this storybook
perhaps he does know

she t(h)reads deep water, they’re never whole
for a while, she knew

she’s been saying never but
it’s too far a stretch

he’s been drawing lines until there’s no more
to draw, she doesn’t mind

for so long they will have to live in the clouds
but for one day, they may not

one day they won’t have to ask, “are you okay?” anymore

they don’t know. not just yet.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again —Sylvia Plath