My Summer Love Still Burns

By

I know I shouldn’t still love you.
I know I shouldn’t still cough up my heart, presenting it to you like it’s something you want.
Like it’s something you asked for,
You did not ask for my confessions.
I know this,
I know.
“We never even really dated,” I choke on my own words.
I close my eyes and remember the first night you kissed me,
the urgency of us,
of needing to close all spaces.
A jigsaw of skin constructed to fit each other perfectly.

It is a gross fact that keeps me up when everyone else is asleep.
It is the track that keeps repeating,
people are asking for a new song but I do not know how to tell them,
my CD player is broken and this is all I can get to work.
It is a pathetic story I tell myself again
and again
until I am dizzy,
Trying to find clarity,
to find peace,
to find reason,
to find your face pressed into mine again.

You say we will probably get married one day.
And I want to throw up,
thinking this might never be.
Those might just be words you release, like caged songbirds,
you have no idea how much I’m still singing for you.
There’s a thumbprint of yours on everything I do,
The boys I kiss.
That I bit my own lip to keep from saying your name with the vanilla boy.
I wanted you.

I have never loved another the way I loved you.
The way I still do.
You are my favorite summer day and I wear you on my skin
during winter
and spring
and fall for you all over again.
Every poem is me trying to bleed you,
trying to let it all run out.
But there’s just so much.
I am scared I will be an old woman with wrinkles from laughing,
and crying,

and you will still be in letters I draft.
Husbands,
children.
I know it is unhealthy to fixate,
to recreate memories.
But you text me
and it’s all back.
Fingers,
trembling,
trying again and again.

“I love you, I love you.”

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