I miss you and I can't sleep

I want to write about how I keep running my fingers over your skin, because I'm afraid that if I keep my hands still you will disappear.

And how every time I touch your face, I try to memorize it - just in case, I try to memorize it with my fingertips.

And I have novels in my head about the way your lips taste, pages upon pages about vanilla and coffee and jasmine and I swear there is a hint of oak as well, and cigarette, and future or what I think future tastes like - sweet, and promises, secret and whispered and just ours, but how can a kiss taste like time standing still, like magic? how do I write a poem about it?

I want to write about the fears, but there are too many - the ones where I'm the bad guy and the ones where you are, and then, the really, really scary ones - the ones with no bad guy, with just life.

And I have all these dreams but writing them down is like wishing defeat, it's like admitting that they were never anything more than dreams one has at 16, they were never anything more than a phase, a way to grow up and grow into a job and a life that I always should have wanted.

I wish,

I wish I could write about things,

You and me, and fears and dreams and life, I guess, the way it is - messy and imperfect and so fucking scary, and I wish I could write it all down until it makes sense, until I'm no longer afraid, but see - I keep trying, I keep trying, over and over again, but I can't seem to scratch beneath the surface.

I wish I could write all the scary parts away, leave all the ugliness on a page; and write you in - into the middle and the end and all the spaces in between, like how we wake up and have breakfast with bitter, boiling, black coffee, and how we lead ordinary lifes, and live in a house with a white fence and a red roof and a tree house for kids to hide in and us to get drunk in; I want to write us happy, forever, or at least for as long as it matters.

— m.f. // I miss you and I can't sleep