My Heart Will Heal

Your eyes are dark like midnight, filled with millions of tiny stars

and I don't know what to say to you, what to do

because when I see you,

my

heart 

breaks,

not in two but in so many scattered pieces,

like someone took a sledgehammer to it and the wind did away with what remained,

bam, it's everywhere and it's nowhere and I'm dead and I'm alive.

What am I?

You used to tell me the answer, whisper it every night into the darkness, soft against the hum of the radiator.

And now I watch your reflection in the linoleum floor, features blurred and misshapen but I know it's you,

it's always you,

who made me laugh and made me cry and now, who I can't even look at.

And I want to force you to take back everything you used to say about me

late at night to soothe my pillowcase-tears,

because it's not--

I'm not--

I hear your laugh, I hear it in the hallways, I hear it in the cafeteria

I try to avoid you but you're everywhere, omnipresent,

there with your winning smile and dimples and freckles that I used to count,

hair that I used to braid because you could never do it yourself,

and I think about all the ways that our pasts are intertwined and our futures will be too,

like our fraying friendship bracelets that have toiled through six summers and are splitting at the sides.

I imagine you smiling at me again, laughing at my mediocre jokes,

giving me your long hugs that smell like lemon and lavender.

I imagine someday, talking to you and saying words I've held in,

hid deep within the depths of my mind.

And maybe then, you'll be back in my room almost every night,

whispering into the darkness against a sky that matches your eyes,

and I'll look at you in the morning, within the yellow-pink glow of daylight,

 and

my heart will heal.