Eighty-three.

Dear god.
I do not speak to you.
I do not necessarily believe
in most things, but sometimes
I feel like I have to.
If you exist, then you know life
and you know that people occasionally need
to believe in something outside
of themselves.

Dear god.
There is a lot of death, lately.
I am not sure what to do with it.
Everyone keeps saying to me,
"Are you breathing?"
And I take a moment to measure the air,
and I still cannot find a non-scientific
answer.

Dear god.
I am sorry that I can't capitalize.
I like to think of myself
as a brave person. You and I both know
that this is not always the case,
and I often do not know who to apologize to
for my cowardice. Myself, maybe.
It is only me that is left with the Loss.
I am getting scared.

Dear god.
I am making many things, but again,
I'm not sure what to do with them.
Once upon a time, there was always a place.
Hand, heart, home.
The other question:
"How are you?" Shattered.
The word is both smaller and larger
than myself.

Dear god.
The nightmares only stop
when I ask you to make them stop
and I wake up feeling okay
but then I stand up
and there are the tidal waves.
I am sorry that I ask you for things.
I am sorry that I asked him for things.
Grace came from you both.

Dear god.
This is me trying to be optimistic.
I fell out of love with life for a long while.
Add this to my apology list.
I am not certain, but I think that love
means bravery, and bravery means life,
but I can not figure out
if this means that love equals life.
If that's the case,
I guess I'm pretty screwed.

Dear god.
If I promise to believe in you forever,
will you tell me what to do?

Eighty-two.

How lucky I was. How sorry I am to have taken it for granted.

Eighty-one.

I would pretend so hard
that you couldn't reach me.
A mountain
circled with lava
on an island
in an ocean
filled with dragons.
It was never true.

Eighty.

The fruit on the kitchen table,
turning brown, that you didn't buy
for yourself, and the orange towel
taken from the closet and hung
next to yours. You cannot bring yourself
to touch them.

Seventy-nine. Faster, now.

You've finally drawn too many waves
and you weren't paying close enough attention
and they're swallowing you up,
instead of the sparrows and farmhouses,
pounding into your lungs,
you thought the before was uncomfortable?
You thought that a strained hour was bad?
Here, the dreams about whales
that you can no longer tell him,
the painting in your kitchen from the weekend away,
too many songs, too many oceansides,
too many open fields, too many beautiful places.
His hands that never failed to ground you,
all of the times you told him not to stare,
the gingham of his shirt that you first wrote about,
the battles that you should have fought louder,
god, how everything should have been louder.
Everything should have been so much louder.

Seventy-eight.

I am strong, I am strong, I am strong.

Seventy-seven. Sea creatures turning into monsters turning into buildings.

I've made more drawings
in the last two weeks
than I did in the entirety
of our first year together.
All of it is disgustingly
bittersweet:
The sound of bathwater,
the lack of air conditioning,
the bowl of rotting fruit
positioned in the exact center
of the kitchen table,
and everything
that I no longer believe in.

It's lonely, living here.
I have my cat and two-dozen
sketchbooks, and he wakes me
with a hand on my thigh
when I'm whimpering in nightmares,
but on any given day
I am a solitary creature,
with or without choice.
I keep my shoes in a pile
in a separate bedroom
because you can never have
too many immediately accessible things
to walk away on.