We didn’t bloom together the way we should have. We never eyed each other across neat soil; both self-conscious and self-righteous as we sipped the sun and, in quiet bursts, raced to touch the sky.

We weren’t planted by gentle hands in soft plots with room to stretch our limbs and shield our eyes, nor to bud in peace and thrive and find identity in both our own bold blossoms and as a pulsing piece of the whole lavish garden.

We didn’t bloom because we erupted.
We running-start-swan-dived into stale dirt and were too close from the very beginning.
We didn’t sprout up straight; we snaked and lurked and left no bit of earth untouched by our vibrant, stencil weed fingers declaring ourselves alive.

By harvest we were tangled beyond repair.
By harvest I didn’t know me from you, and I liked it.

To be so entwined is lovely but depends on a balance
we could only begin to grasp.
To expand but not uproot requires perfect synchronicity maybe not beyond our years but certainly beyond our maturity. We spread out our emotions like tarot cards on a towel in the grass, and reflected in your sunglasses I met the silent pieces of me.
In colorful, grim drawings those quiet, ugly bits floated up veins and settled under ribs.
They stayed silent. Until they began to scream.

And you and I — we didn’t have the words,
not our own words that we earned and burned while stumbling across months and plains,
tripping over potholes and finding our feet quicker each time.
We had place-holder words we sang back and forth and splashed around and bathed in.
The words we spoke were profound and cardboard.
We were just reading lines, sharing identical scripts and an ache to be seen
so deep and desperate it was sinful.

We shared the humid cling of regret, which hung heavy in stuck-air auditoriums;
its beaded sweat echoed, rolling down spines and turning blood to sticky wax as we whispered in the corner about the things we could say aloud while our minds never left the things we wouldn’t dare.

We were mostly ill-equipped.
We joked about hurricanes;
We didn’t survive the first storm.

I want you to know you really hurt my feelings.
I want you to know you’re the first guy I’ve given my feelings to hurt.
I want you to know I was terrible towards the end.
And I know that. But you gave up on me.

You gave up on me at the exact moment I was giving up on myself.
Even as my tongue stung metallic and veins pulsed so hot and loud
through my eardrums that I felt I would explode — it was clean.
It was all remarkably clean
and sterile.
There were no explosions.
No shattered plates, bloody knuckles, or blown-out voices
that scratched and rose in time with the sun.

Just a quick slash of rope —
an anchor cut loose and left to sink;
our secrets were set free to
rust over and collect algae.
We were suddenly off the hook
for any vulnerability we might have spilled
on each other in our fits of laughter
and hours of sleep.
A deep sigh of relief.
A deeper sigh of desolation.

The moment exists in sad yellow lighting that must have been added in retrospect.
I tweaked the floor of my memory too:
at that moment I was not wearing flip flops on linoleum — but sinking, slowly and barefoot, into chilly riverbed mud as it turned to ice.

I opened the door, and there you stood.
You knew I had been crying, and I didn’t try to hide it;
it was too exhausting — running on fumes.

And I did expect something from you,
anything from you, that might dull the singed-dagger plunging
stab to my chest with each breath I gulped and spat .
I wanted anything that might reel me in from the cliffs edge
where my thoughts had carried me on horseback.

But you had nothing.
I watched your eyes glaze over my swollen lips and pinced, glassy eyes.
You threw back the melted, Picasso-esque mask where my face once was,
like a quick, sharp shot of warm whiskey.
Careful to avoid eye contact you slipped “fuck this”
under your breath and started to reach for my hand.

You started to, but then after a second suspended,
you let your arm fall back to your body.
Head lowered, jaw clenched and you turned and fled with a new heaviness pushing down on your posture.
It looked painful and adult.
It looked like you finally felt the weight of our season.
And watching you go, I shrank in lighter and thicker because I felt it too.

We are not going to get a happy ending —
not with each other and not right now.
Maybe not ever.
And that will have to do.
(Though I will miss your hand in mine.
I hope one day you’ll remember being tangled with me, and it will make you laugh before you cringe because I didn’t like to be alone.)

If I wanted to be alone, I would just go home.