it only hurts because of the intimate pods: the love-zippered pockets that held us together under the pelt of showerwater, when your skin was at once smooth and ridged and your hair smelled like loam in an herb garden; the hope-sealed silos where the drizzling grain laid tracks for our bodies’ ballad; the ark your back made of our bedsheets as you rubbed my temples, we inhaled the soapy wind and you whispered, let’s get zen with this shit; the bubble of fused breath in a grocery store line, when your phantom chin rests on my shoulder and your lost lips ripple against my ear: we should get gummi lifesavers; the forcefield of whispers at the cinema, when i turn for your eyes in the dark and find nothing more than gilt flecks of projection.
it only hurts because of the orbs wherein it worked before it didn’t. we were a galaxy once: cosmic, foreordained. and now, we’re one again: distant, irretrievable. without these hallows, there would only be indifference. and though indifference is a useful shroud now that love is immaterial, you should know that i remember.
i loved you. i swear it.
for proof, you need only peel open the pods.
