NEPTUNE BURNS

5 items

List of things you left behind:

1. Your mother's old Chanel Number 5. You always thought it smelled snobbish and heady like a cocktail and mimosa mixed with a migraine fueled soccer mom's heartache. (I spray it onto the coach pillows every now and then like we used to when your parents would visit. I sometimes pretend you're out buying sushi from that Japanese store near Fifth that we always went to on our lazy days - any second now and I will hear you walk through our door.)

2. The black glass beaded rosary your uncle made for your high school graduation. You were never one to subscribe to religion but, like clockwork, I would watch your hand crawl toward the post of the bed where it lay hanging and clutch it till you fell asleep. Your small fingers twisted themselves like hooks, your wrist limp, eyes rolling as if searching for this majestic light unseen. Perhaps no god ever kept the nightmares away from you but maybe holding on to this was all you needed - the magic of wanting a miracle, the magic of wanting and wishing away. (I lay at night and hold it open palmed while I contemplate why I can see the yellow walls when it is night and everything is surrounded by black. I wonder why your nightmares etched themselves into me. [was i the nightmare?] i wonder why you prayed to a god you didn't know didn't like didn't want and why you found this faceless being more comforting than my arms. I wonder why yellow is suddenly the gloomiest of colors as I clutch this pile of beads in my palm. [please god, come back to me.]

3. The mustard yellow sweater your father bought you on clearance at the local mall that is fading away with every wash but is just as warm as you remember. You never put softener on it but it's coarse texture felt like home to your overexposed veins and thin skin. Days on end I can remember you on this bed, in this room, yellow sweater with yellow sunflowers and your brown waves sprouting like vines from the top of your knotted bun. When did this stop becoming home? This second skin you wore on top of everything and held to your chest like the holiness befitting an old friend - an old gift - an old love. When did you stop holding it to your skin and feeling it's yellowness deep into your skin / felt it trickle sallow faced down your sleeves / pool at your fingertips in pollen encrusted buds. When did this [I] stop being your solar planet away from the cosmos. When did you shed yourself / engulf the sun / consume the room in light / when did you / when did you when did you / [why did you]. When did my all become nothing but this use-to-be favorite sweater, yellowed out and frayed with nothing to show for it but stiff fibers holding me together aching [for you] for the warmth a sunless galaxy craves.

4. Ursula's shell necklace that your sister bought you for your eighteenth birthday. A little mermaid's song encased in golden spiraled imprisonment embezzled within the confines of this floor board apartment turned sea monster carcass. Sometimes when I'm falling asleep I can hear you singing next to me like those nights when the thunderstorms where booming so loud our foundation shook. You sang the way some people prayed and by god I swear the storm grew calmer at the sound of your voice [or maybe it was my heart that felt less catatonic]. You used to hold the necklace to your throat and sing softly, it was no siren song nor swan song it was the song of a girl terrified of the sea but enchanted with how it pulled her feet to and from shore / a girl who wrapped lightning around her like an afghan, wore cut glass as smiles carved into the hollowed spaces of her stomach / a girl tethered by an anchor weighed on her chest, sinking slowly with her fingers slowly releasing it inside of her. When it gets too quiet and I forget I am supposed to pretend you are coming back, I hold this heavy necklace in my palms and wonder if I should slam a hammer onto it. If I could crush this space that held pieces of you - felt vibrations of your voice, felt sweat slicked skin from your throat, touched chapped sand dune lips - would you sing for me? [would you crash against the cliff edge of my {our} bedroom walls. would you pull me under? would you be a part of my world again?]

5. Across the path of running without understanding /why/ you were always a flight risk, across voicemails of drunken apologies, across the floor of unsaid words swallowed by fear. You left. Left wisps of us in this apartment haunted by shards of you, you never bothered to realized shattered. Left me to reminisce about days when collecting dirt off the floor didn't mean stumbling across a chapstick cap or a chewed pencil wondering where you are at ten at night. [Me.] You left me. I still can't bring myself to ask you why. And if someone asks? You're at the sushi restaurant we loved so much, I'm setting the table just waiting for you to come home to me.

-lilacpoet because your work always leaves me begging for more