What Being Alone For a Year Feels Like

I mean this in an ironic but maybe painfully relative way
That being alone for a year did not teach me some hardened life lesson
One where I can take gentle footsteps into my driveway at 2am and listen to the moon and then tell someone online about it the next day,
Brushing off the ends of my sentences that I’ve so daintily organized into secret stanzas so it appears romanticized and full of color
With a joke or a couple trio slang of letters
So I don’t appear as though I truly and desperately need help
But that’s beside the fact,
Because the moon didn’t tell me anything of importance
Or anything I can nod shyly to and glance to my feet
Whispering into my jacket that
Yes, that makes total sense! Thank you, moon.
That didn’t happen
But if there’s anything I did in fact gain from this lengthy numbness
It’s that even if there’s nobody there
To hear
The silence can still listen
It can reverberate and ricochet back into the roof of your mouth
Where the cocoon of empty essay cursors are just waiting to bloom
Just waiting and waiting
For someone like you to finally hit one of the worn down letters on the keyboard
So that I can finally speak
See? I’m finally half awake.
Maybe now I am feeling something of the sort
Perhaps my dry tongue is dipping into the watered down silence
The one that makes me wonder if that poem I read about loneliness on Tumblr really is true
That I can open my mouth and see the butterfly with the black text wings
I can see her now
She’s beating her wings
The cursor is no longer just that
The tragic crumpled sphere of paper with no word or rhyme
Hey moon, I did it.
It’s an entire garden
The butterflies are threaded through my hair and down my throat
But it’s no longer empty documents just stuffed into my lungs
All for the wretched motive of keeping me sane or even half decent on any given day
It’s the open page
The cursor is moving at rapid speeds and the funny thing is
There’s only one writer and one butterfly and one moon
But that’s okay
Because every now and then she’ll go back to the driveway
And this time her whole body is there
Not just her mouth with the swollen tongue
And the moon will say nothing of importance
Not even a half decent thread of support
But I smile and hand her mine
The support I found in the dryness of a rhyme.
I woke up.