“(“to various persons, all at once” / part xxvi.)
I would like to remember you by the way I could feel the universe straining at your seams at all times and the way your hands traced shapes that no one else could name in the palms of my hands. For the way you said my name like it was a secret and the time you told me that if I were to get lost, like a sheep scared blind, you would always come and find me. We were dropping clues inside of our battle cries and praying that each other could decipher the love we laced up like braids and then gave away. You were the first person to sift through the wreckage of jaded years and dust me off, the first person to figure out how to make me entirely sweet, the first person to call me out of my battlements, safeguarded behind brick, scared shitless of everything outside of me. There are an awful lot of miles between us now—a distance that I have become familiar and comfortable with—but not even state-lines could stop the synchronizing of hearts, twin pulses beating under the pale wrists I would wrap my fingers around so that you couldn’t forget me. I started sleeping with my phone on my bed so that I would uncover your “goodmorning”s when the light came like treasure in the caverns of my sheets, and you stopped smoking, at least for a little while. I would like to remember you in tall grass and in the field off of fourth street and milk out of mason jars in front of the fireplace singing the Quiet Things under your breath. I’d like to remember you in mosquito bites and late nights and first crushes turned to first loves instead of girls who share my namesake and stab-wounds and car crash hearts.”

what’s mine is yrs.: twenty-six: milk out of mason jars.