I filled my mouth with answers of you:

your whereabouts,

your recent girlfriends.

They commanded these responses from me,

without stopping to

acknowledge that I may not know the answers, either, that I was just as afraid of losing you, and that you had left one cold, blue morning while the birds pecked apart the morning silence with their practiced melodies. I am not one for leaving lovers half-frozen in bed, one leg draped over the mattress--this one eager to leave, to urge you to stay--and the other leg, still warm with a long sleep, desperate to never abandon its safe place beneath the thick sheets, inside the small home.

I remember orange afternoons, kites colored like lollipops, we bared our arms for the warm weather, felt the itchy grass, felt the love of one thousand years. I remember plump water balloons, the hot, milky nights, cradling a tea-cup, cradling your heart for it existed in mine. I remember worrying about everything and nothing at all, drifting bare-feet through the grass. I remember you rubbing my dome-shaped mosquito bites, soothing me into sleep so that I would not awake crying, howling your name, scratching my eyelids purple. I remember how quickly those afternoons melted into night, how quickly the sun, like an apricot seed, slipped out of sight, slipped out of sight. Though I am much older now and possess many worries, many real problems that require tending, nurturing, banishing, I still think back to those days, or perhaps think forward, because it is I who have moved back, it is this that is backwards, this painful regression, I am strangled by things, by empty, hollow things, I am suffocating underneath the unnecessary pressure of chores, obligations, doings, I no longer live, but exist, I am a soulless, smile-less human doing.

Long before I threw myself to you the orange birds produced quick melodies with their purple tongues. I felt like a small girl, observing them while many important situations unraveled before me, situations I had nothing at all to do with. For example, the first female British prime minister was appointed. I squinted hard at her picture, she seemed to have accomplished so many things. The newsman mumbled for an entire hour just listing all that she had witnessed in her life, all that she had contributed and all that she had been a part of. People like her made me feel painfully small. They made me feel like there was something wrong with sitting idle, cross-legged, clawing through trash, observing birds, counting freckles, chasing sheep. I felt rather odd, spinning my separate lies, feasting on fetid fantasies, dozing in damp basements, peeling warm, mushy tangerines. What would I have done?