HOME.

 There are a lot of impossible things:

like trying to build a permanent shelter inside a body that was never meant to be a home,
like forcing memory to stay still when it was born to scatter and dissolve,
like asking a flame not to burn yet needing it to keep you warm.

Telling me not to love you again
is like asking water not to wet my tongue,
is like asking the moon to unlearn its light
telling me not to love you again seems like that.

I hate you, then I love you,
then I hate that I hate you so much and love you so much more.

Nothing logical about me and you,
nothing sensible about your secrecy and your endless vanishing acts,
nothing rational about the way I still return,
again and again, like a moth rehearsing its death on the tongue of fire.

I want to say I don’t regret all the things I’ve done,
but I know regret cuts you deeper than knives.
So instead I stare at you and let my silence disguise the truth,
say I didn’t want to do it,
while the ruins of my wanting still smolder inside me.

I want your hands to anchor my restless legs while I sleep.
I want to keep waking next to you,
to hear the sound of your laughter soften my anxiety,
to climb my bed again, again and again,
even if it means not touching me at all.

I don’t mind being malnourished if it means being fed by you,
let me starve so long as your fullness fools me into believing in abundance.

I want to keep being home.
I want to caress you into speaking,
to coax words from your silence like pulling threads from a stubborn fabric.
I want to make your favorite meals on your bad days,
to set a table where grief can sit but not consume us whole.

I want you to keep looking at me,
confused,uncertain whether to stay or leave
because in that confusion we carve our language,
in that hesitation we invent our routines.

We keep coming back, again and again,
until we can’t anymore.
And even then, when distance finally has its way,
I want you to remember:
my heart will forever remain a home for you.