Distance

I watch the street lamps flicker, dim shadows

casting themselves against the walls. The night,

a silent accomplice to this distance,

stretching between where I sit and where

the memory of you might still breathe.

You said you wanted to find yourself,

as though the self could be searched for

in the creases of cities, in the worn-out phrases

of books that never close. I have spent years

losing myself in words, and still I am no closer

to knowing what they mean, or what I mean

when I think of you.

All lovers are a lie, perhaps, even to themselves.

I am an actor standing on an empty stage,

speaking to ghosts. I turn the lines over in my mouth, like stones I might skip across water,

ripples spreading until the lake forgets.

What was it we wanted, after all?

To hold each other like water in our hands,

to be more than two shadows passing

beneath the same indifferent moon.

The days go by like hours, the hours,

blurred lines between light and dark.

I watch from the window as the city folds into itself,

the streets still, only a few scattered lights burning

for no one in particular. It is enough, sometimes,

to know that I am here, alive with the ache

of my own half-formed longing,

and you, somewhere out there,

a constellation I cannot touch.