Chapter Text
you spend your whole life falling in love with two people.
they are blinding, binary stars that your attentions orbit around,
one warm like the first touch of spring after a long winter,
one cool like the first breeze off the water in high summer.
you don’t know it at first,
but this is not considered normal.
it doesn’t seem important to you in your younger years,
when your head is full of strawberry-blonde
and the sound of your best friend’s laughter.
you carry an inhaler in your backpack,
and you read every book on space you can,
because the cat’s eye nebula reminds you,
of the things in her smile that you could never name.
love was a simple thing,
and your mother still planted roses in the spring.
with time, though, comes expectations.
things like crushes and kissing and dating,
and it becomes very clear that your mangled heart
is not supposed to beat in two directions.
but it does, oh how it does.
it taps out two different rhythms,
old and familiar and unrestrained as ever,
but weaving together seamlessly;
cascading harmonies that, if you close your eyes
and focus, sound like the answers to questions
you haven’t thought of yet. it is scary and wonderful
and you hoard these melodies to pull out in the darkness,
when sleep will not come, and time will not pass.
you cannot disentangle the runaway train wrecks
of your crash-cart heart, so you make a decision.
you can’t have both, so you let each go.
one stays by your side, one drifts further away,
both feel impossibly distant.
part of you aches to leave roses in their lockers,
and let long lingering words see the light of day,
but there are no more roses in your garden,
because there is no garden.
your mother has been dead for twelve whole months
and nothing of her remains except for the broken
hunch of your father’s back
when he comes home in the shadow of the
midnight moon.
you give up, and it looks like this:
you pointedly ignore the things people whisper
about you and your best friend in hallways,
and insist to anyone that will listen that you are in love
with the most popular girl in school.
it’s not a lie, but an unfinished declaration that you know
will not come to fruition (though this does not stop the love
you feel for her growing like vines up the walls of your heart
when she corrects your seventh grade biology teacher about cellular division).
this seems worse in a way that you feel in your marrow,
and these transitional years feel like an endless stretch,
like the desert highway at night, or the star-cloaked horizon you watch
from the roof of your house when the nights aren't too cold,
and you wonder what exactly inside of you is broken.
giving up feels like silence,
so you get used to the quiet.