of all the things I can't write about

I don't know how to write about the way it feels to let you go.

Is it an idea,

a fleeting feeling that was never the kind of thing meant to be held?

I don't know how to write about the way you first looked up at me

in a wall of perfectly explored sound,

an infectious synergy,

danced around my notes like it was the most intimate act,

and still thought about me enough in the car ride home

to tell me about it later.

I don't know how it feels to write about all the affection you had for me when she wasn't around,

or all the ways you invent that I can disappear when she is.

I don't know how to write about how she looks just a little bit too much like me,

the same five foot three,

the same deep brown hair,

standing three feet away from you on Broadway,

and you even farther from me.

How can I talk about

staring down at your feet,

the fiddling of the straw in your hand,

the nervous leg twitching,

and all Hendricks I was drinking,

pulling his chest on top of me later

only to imagine the things

that you could do to me instead,

around the corner of the venue,

in bathroom stalls between sets.

All that comes after

you cradling my hands on a golden crushed velvet couch,

two times through a cheap Negroni,

listening in on my dreams with a giddy intensity,

in this spontaneous,

exciting,

yet devastatingly doomed

72 hour feeling.

I don't know how to write about that yet.

I don't know how to write about how it feels to be the treasure and the mistake,

the illicit love and the stranger,

the velvet jester of strings,

still toying with the keys to my estate.

I don't know how to write about the things I'm not sure were ever real,

or how I know you'll never ever read this,

how even if you missed me, I could never know,

or if that is exactly why the outcome is meaningless.

How it can all phase past over time

like ripples that intersect at a single point

before retreating further and further away

until they are simply

gone.

Let's pretend we are happy all over again.

Let's exist back in the days in which I remained just a name you had heard around before.

It's easier on the psyche, isn't it -

disarming the mere-exposure effect?

Those velvet couches will be for those

who really fall in love with the hand of investigation

and follow it to the ends of the earth.

I'll vow that synchronicity

will be the only wish

we can afford to make -

even if it kills me

just a little inside

every time.