white lies

it doesn't even feel real knowing you tell someone else the secrets that used to belong to the spaces between our respective lips and ears. displaced but not replaced, where do i fit into the picture you never finished erasing before changing your viewpoint and starting over? and it's fine, that you need to make changes and that i don't fit into what makes you happy- because you know i never wanted you unhappy- but it's not fair to appropriate what isn't entirely yours.
all those certain groups of words we fumbled to turn into archetypes of that dynamic, how am i supposed to feel seeing that parts i loaned to the bigger picture hang so far out of my view?
your silence says so much more than civil words ever could. they keep my apologies afloat, keep unspoken goodbyes hanging in the air like breath meeting a world too cold to let it survive; we're passing clouds, indeterminate shapes, we're bitterness-we are angry and it means nothing but ruin if you don't say it out loud.
at night it's worst, and i often feel like even the stars i search for answers can see that something is missing from me; they direct my thoughts to the places it might be hiding, content in your bed like a sleeping lover or underneath like monsters waiting; in hollows and crevices i couldn't have memorized better were they my own.
and it's true that i love you, because love fades and falls away, love gets bruised up and love loses faith and hope, but love doesn't die when it lives in the kind of heart that still remembers the phantom shadow of decoration removed from its walls.
my heart, it beats the same whether you think my name or not, but i can tell that it knows when you do, that it wishes it had words, wishes for ladders to hang them up high enough for us both to, for once, see clearly what it meant to say but never got the chance to.
i think you want me to miss you, as sure as remembering you helps me sleep despite it being a coldly pointed finger at every spot you used to keep warm. i won't forget those instants, how they seemed to wrap themselves in cellophane, tried to prevent the tangles knotted by sharpened corners of the moments we'd rather forget and maybe took too close to heart. those little points of light are beyond regret and guilt, existing only because they do, a reminder of the bright and overwhelming truth it's too late to digest by the time it finally reaches our eyes. i hope she's keeping you warm and that my frantic wishing doesn't disturb your sleep, i hope over these nights your eyes become accustomed to what sentiments i've tucked in the spaces of sky that you can't ignore even with eyes closed, and i think when you finally adjust to that light you'll see that i've been leaving it on for you.