Where You Belong

For a moment there,
I could have sworn
That our souls were made
Of the same stuff.

How else would I have known
Exactly what your voice sounded like?
A velvety soft baritone,
Designed to sing my own, personal lullaby.

We must have known each other once before.

I fell for you one balmy night in Bali,
Somewhere between ‘Jolene’
And excited sleeps.
We danced to a hopeful tune of forever,
The naive fools we were.

But our cocktail pasts
Mixed into a batch of bitter brew,
Impossible to drink,
Without the threat of poison spreading.

Sometimes your sediment memory would sink,
Replaced by layers of new wonder,
Momentarily forgotten,
Until agitated into the foreground.

Damn those triggers.

You spoke the language of computers,
But never understood the human processor,
Operating in murmured blurs of grey.
Often without instruction.

We latched onto fears that weren’t our own.
Two frightened birds,
Tethered to one another,
Incapable of flight.

I promised I wouldn’t run from your scars,
And that I’d hold gently
The warmth of your histories
In the palms of my hands.

But these small hands can only carry so much,
And baby believe me when I say I tried.

I still send letters into the void,
Hoping some unseen mailman
Will translate my message into code
That your heart can understand.

Because the real ones I’ve sent
Do not reach you anymore.
I do not reach you anymore.
And yet, this girl doesn’t know how not to write you.

Between us,
There is now only silence,
In its most devastating form.
The kind between strangers.

All the same,
I will always hold dear
The cherished memory
Of a time with you.

I will shelve you quietly into
The libraries of my mind,
Where this chapter can collect dust,
And find a home in the past.

It’s where you belong now.