Without You

The car winds through narrow dirt roads, you lose track at the third turn and only recover when the house appears at the other side of the hill. This little cottage where so much of your childhood unraveled, where they measured their heights along the door post and you thought the narrow strip of sand was an endless beach by the water's edge. You remember how warm the summers, how familiar the dialect, and the silence of the night makes your head buzz. You long to sleep the heavy sleep that only the countryside can produce, and you think all the worries, and all the questions, and all the unease of life will wash right out of you. 

There's a monotonous pounding in your head. 

You hope it'll break you at last. Prepare the ground for building something new. 

Carry Me Home

I hear you're happy now. I hear she's everything you thought you'd never find, and everything has come so easy, where it never had before. I suppose you won't walk the streets late at night anymore, contemplating the twists of solitude and heaviness of life like we used to. I suppose come sunrise you'll be light of spirit, and that's great. I just miss you, that's all.

(The rain lifted today, for a minute. I tried to remember the last time I looked at you without sadness, but it's been so clouded over by everything that came after, and maybe if I saw you today I wouldn't know your scent from a stranger in the street. And it's just easier to not think of it at all.)

Elusive

The endless summer days end in a cold rain on Monday morning. I ran around the royal grounds and met not a person in the woods, as the weather ran in tendrils along my cheeks. Walked back down the main street and tried to see my reflection in the eyes of people I'd meet, try to find my belonging.

We sat in their living room, drinking coffee and smiling at the children, their newborn baby still resting in my arm, as the evening grew sunny and warm in the late hour. I looked at these people who live in the very core of my heart, people whose mere existence makes me second-guess my home across the ocean, and I thought what an immense blessing it is to love. But when she says I miss you, when she says she'll stay here if I return, I do not understand the words. The mere idea that I exist in their world when I am not here seems preposterous. How could anything in me, possibly mean anything, truly, to you?

The nights carry on with their blue skies and birdsong, oblivious to the struggles of humanity. It's reassuring, when everything else is so hard.

vs. Nurture

Early morning, Stockholm quiet in the slight haze and no people in the street except dog walkers. I ran across the square --I'm always late-- and rubbed my tired eyes as I made my way onto the boat. We sat in the wind, snuggled under a blanket and giggling, as it made its way out of the city harbor and into the archipelago beyond. 

There's a silence by the sea that permeates your every pore. There's the rhythmic lapping of waves against the cliffs, the screech of gulls a hundred feet in the air, the low murmur of boats between the islands, but beyond that, there is nothing. We made our way to a quiet cove, with a few stray boats moored at its edges, and remarked how we weren't made for cities, after all. Spent a few perfect hours finding each other again, remembering who we are with each other, relishing the few moments we have before oceans of time pass between us again. You curse your vagabond heart for always leaving them, for always being so lost that you don't see love when it wraps its arms around you. 

Summer is devastatingly beautiful. Your skin is warm, smells of sunscreen. There is nowhere you would rather be, and you don't have to. 

to Ashes

Speak louder

than the words before

you. 

The days continue in a haze. The sun shines brighter than you remembered, the waters sparkle in a deeper blue than you could imagine. We lay staring into the waves, mesmerized, as he relearned your names and your place in his heart. Later, as the evening cooled off and became a Friday night in the city, you cradled a tiny being mere days in the world and forgot you ever had a life anywhere else. It would have been your grandmother's birthday today. It's your first time back without visiting her but your laugh still rings of her sentiment. 

The streets are quiet when you return to your temporary home on the other side of town, but the sky is still blue, the air still sweet with flowers. 

Life is overwhelming sometimes, and you still don't know who you are in it. 

Twilight

And suddenly there it is, the lush green land bathed in a bright morning sun. A sprawling city glittering in its countless waters, and the overwheing scent of elder flower in bloom. They appear at a turn in the street, at the end of undulating hills at sunset: people you love more than you thought you knew how. They smile at you now in the flesh, you can put your arms around them and hear their laughter up close; it's like you never left. The Stockholm night lingers in the magical moment between dusk and dawn as you make your way home in silence.  You hadn't forgotten how impossibly beautiful it is. You just don't have space for the longing its absence creates. 

Your jet lagged mind tries to sleep. 

Dreams of a sunrise mere minutes away. 

I Thought You Were

The world looks different from the air, the sun shines at a different angle. The blood in my veins still races with adrenaline, with all the pressing tasks on the to-do list hovering over my shoulders, but the list is a thousand miles away now, and that which wasn't done will have to wait. Your phone buzzes incessantly with longing, with images of those whose faces you soon will see, whose arms in which you soon will rest. Anticipation tingles in your every nerve. Soon, soon, below this cloud cover is a land in which the sun will not set. Soon, soon, you will lean into that space from which you came, which still whispers your name. In your chest already beats the bittersweet sting of separation, of not being able to live in two worlds at once, of always being incomplete.

For a short while, in ignorant bliss, you thought it made you a richer person to belong in so many places, to have jewels of people dotted like a fine necklace all around the globe and to fit right in like a spy undercover. But you are tired now, you are sad, and the tears where you've left others behind are still raw, heal jaggedly. You are a patchwork of makeshift fixes.

You are broken beyond repair.