I beckon you to come home
Your smell still lingers in the garden
And the couch where I last
Heard your voice on the phone
You told me you would return
Maybe not tomorrow
Maybe not even next week
But eventually, when you learned
Why you were named after the Oribilis butterfly
Why the ground turned to ash
Where you tread like a faerie
Always so shy
In a chase for Saturn, Venus and Mars
You gave up my worship
Our forever home
And the ceiling stars
I stuck them up for you
Climbing up on the rickety stool
You'd remember Arabella
You were there too
You were pleading me to come down
With eyes squinted and awaiting a fall
My legs wobbled and my heart fluttered
You never could offer me a genuine frown
Come look how tall your plants have grown
Would you come, my dearest love
If I told you in raggedy breaths
And static through the phone
Just how blue the wallpaper looks
Now that you're gone
And how I wish you would creep up behind me
In our magnolia lawn
I would drop my lemonade on the ground
You would wipe my shirt
And get lost in the backyard trees
Swaying gently as you spun around
You’d rather be a bird, I’d implore
You need not confess what I already know
But you 'd throw your head back laughing
And say: I would miss you more
It's getting harder to believe you
Your face is fading away
In the cascading fireworks that echo:
You were too good to be true
Your touch was too soft
Your frame too melancholy
Your fingers were always crossed
You sucked in your belly
You never spoke unless spoken to
Always agreed with an upturned mouth
Like it was a secret just how badly
You wanted out
You would tell me that all you needed
Was for it have a purpose
All the anguish and the phantoms should
Count to some higher conscious
I imagined marriage as being in the trenches
Not an analogy for being caught
But instead losing people left and right
To an alien concept while dodging its punches
I saw it as a failure and a flaw
Giving in would mean I can't stand myself alone
But I confess: it scathed me that no one longed for me
Not even to adorn
I never expected you to tolerate me
Not when I can hardly do it on my own
But what of all the devotion leftover
Salty waves that drown me in their sea
I forgot that we were more than two
It wasn't just me and my smallness
There was time, a quiet slip of chaos
And then there was you
I am starting to see, Arabella
that two people bound together by loneliness
Adoringly unbeknown
Will eventually break free
You were the first to break the tether
The first to move your lips
Unheard words drifting through me
Disappeared with you, as light as a feather
(Since I pasted this straight from my notes app, the stanza format got messed up. But rest assured — it was four lines each)
