Letters to Sea

I didn’t know it snowed on the beach until you / ran our road out of horizon / rearview memories in the backseat / a skipping CD the only / melody left between / us.

“you wondered if the waves froze before they broke”

I still tell people we met / among the dead, unburied stories / immortalized in stone for wandering / tourists to peek at through phones. / In a museum full of marbled statues / you were the only thing living / enough to steal my breath / carelessly for yourself.

And there we were, foolishly / flirting on the fringes of friendship, splitting / stale candies in the back of dingy theaters, playfully / arguing over the meaning of words / written by men too dead for us / to really care, creating constellations across / our irregular moles, rearranging / the lacking poetry sections of under / used bookstores, our nights / spent conversing over Chinese takeout turned / to mornings memorizing coffee orders / in foreclosing cafés. / And somewhere in between, we became / the picture in our bedside frame.

You hated my poems, you / wrote your own lines / in the space between mine, / making sure they never rhymed, / and that was when I knew.

“don’t turn me into a muse,” you said, “but when you do, make sure I’m everyone’s favorite poem”

With you, everything / has meaning: chipped / mugs, ticket stubs, the tiniest / touch, handwritten hugs left / on bathroom mirrors, consciously romancing / the mundane, your laughter / haunting the halls of our home. / Its absence. / Knowing your tomorrows / will become my favorite / memories. / The fingerprints you leave / behind on picture frames and window / panes and the doorknob / as you walk away, / your patched up pockets stuffed / with the collected sea / shells crumpled to sand / under their own pressure.

So, maybe our romance grew / sober too soon, our moments / overdrawn, the tides rose / before we could swim.

“we were a holiday love affair”

It wasn’t about you / and your hesitation in holding my hand / or the casual glances / caught by strangers’ eyes. / It wasn’t the petty pleasantries / to please people you like / less than me / or dinners with a side of silence, / headphones in, listening to / nothing I have to say. / It wasn’t us / changing in different directions / or when the space between / the lines turned into I’m sorrys / spoken with less meaning / in every recitation. / It was when your footsteps fading along the shoreline / seemed more like poetry than goodbye.

I wish I had drowned you / in all the things I left unsaid.

“and maybe I was the shore you broke against”

But I still find your hairs clinging / to my jacket sleeves, still find myself / ordering your go-to drink by mistake at / another café, still buy the strawberry / tarts instead of cherry because they were / your favorite, and now they are mine, still / swipe to your horoscope first, and still try / to connect the dots of our constellations, / still leave hopeless pleas / on crumpled stationary in case / one finds you again, still open / the spine-broke books we bought / half-off just to read you / through the margin notes / you left me. / Still drive down every dead-end street / searching for that snowy beach.

I miss your hand always in my / back pocket where now only / an unfinished poem rests / in pieces of forgotten memories.

If these letters should ever reach you / just know you can find me / where your laughter still echoes / down the hallway, collecting / dust on the emptied dresser / with the sea / shells, forgotten / by the penciled-in plans / erased too easily, caught / between two cliffsides / timing the tides, left / among the marbled statues wandering / our crumbling relics.

“I went with the waves that never froze and left you with the memory of snow”