to pass the time.

It was in the early spring when I began to measure life by the blue in his eyes " the livelihood of overwintered grass by the tiny and irregular specks of green in them, made brighter by his crooked grin. They were land-masses to me. 

But the tide always came and he was gone. 

 

How is it justified that humans are cursed with the beating ache of love?

An invention of our minds, scratched onto the walls

from the inkwell of your veins. 

Scratched into his back on hazy nights

And gone on foggy mornings. 

 

I feel him haunting me in the night with a gentle caress down my bare spine, but with a yearning reach by midnight moon, I turn and he’s not there. I’m still not certain he ever was. 

But I still feel his breath and soft lips on my neck, gently lifting my hair in the fumbling darkness. Gently lifting my soul. 

 

Through it all I still see the blue in his eyes and that dimpled crooked grin and can’t let it go. It burns in my chest, my cheeks, my finger tips. The same finger tips that once slowly ran over his lips, reminding myself to remember the feeling incase I’d never have it again. I’ll never have him again. He was never mine to take. But I was entirely his. 

 

It’s winter now and the ground is cold. Impenetrable. I search around me for a glimpse of him in the swaying trees, the falling snow, for an echo of his voice in the roaring winds. But now I just find myself standing in the muddied streets. Alone, with no means to measure a life. 

 

He was all I never had.