Waves don’t actually crash;

they ruin

you or the shore,

the others etched onto the crest.

I reach for the remnants of your favorite bottle of hot sauce, my breath half-empty, 

tasting spice and spools and the sparse amount of words I can use to describe how I think of you.  

Her voice settles into the back of my mind. A drum of reasoning and resonance, reckonings forgotten and remembered, a cyclical occasion that becomes a lesion on my bone, growth deterred, past tense more common than the present. 

A suit pressed and shiny shoes,

scuffed from single use, my toes tapping towards all of the fears and and failures I’ve not told you about.

Your dress was cream, glinting, a reason to be blinded. I didn’t need sight after seeing you. 

It was warm. You would’ve liked that. 

You became synonymous with the weather, with a chance of rain leading to covered couch closeness and sunny days that made your lips turn up to the sky and the clouds covering you and me and no one else. 

“I see you,” I say. She doesn’t hear me. I keep rewriting the same sentence, mouthing words noiselessly, poised to say sorry but still starting sentences with ‘I’ rather than ‘you.’ 

She’s heard me ramble and rant, roost over selfishness and silence, tile cold beneath my feet, seated against cupboards and drawers, closer to morning.

Hunched over, filling up a cup of water some time between night and mourning. The day breaking and breaking until there’s no light left to shatter, a matter between two people split, pushed, pulled, the switch flipped downward, dreams deterred and then deferred, words splashing across my eyes, little dots of yellow that rarely stay still, that vanish when I look at them, that only exist for a single second before we fall asleep.  

I hear replies from the sun,

the darkness grappling, outstretched, welcoming,

streetlights whispering, 

cobbles stoned, gutters on top of gutters, rusted, splashed by rainwater, not salty but fresh, tabled next to turkey and ham and potatoes and warm foods inside cold houses, stuffed by 7pm. 

“How’s your heart?”

The TV blares louder.

I wear glasses. My vision doesn’t blur, the corners of my sight curl, blotches of light spurning my eyes, imagining folded napkins on a dinner table set for two. 

Water seeped and then steeped,

a ledge with waves below, sitting and waiting to crash, salt sticking to my legs but not my arms. I swim, slowly.