A Season of Winter

I like your name because it rhymes with the moon. Do you even know mine? Or am I just the barista who's too young to be writing you love letters? I like your name so much, I remind people how to say it just to say it more. Did you ever tell anybody mine? Or was it just a happening—an encounter in passing—that I admired you from afar before I admired you from across the table. I remember that your birthday is August 23rd, which makes you a Virgo, a virgin woman. Mine is March 9th and I'm a Pisces, two fish in one. Your favorite flower is baby's breath, which I find to be unique. Mine is a marigold, if you ever wondered.  I know that you're sensitive. You don't like reminiscing about good times because they're gone. You tear up when you miss your family, I saw it. And sometimes, you feel like you're behind—like you're not where you should be in life. I think you hide behind self-development because you're scared to be seen vulnerable. But that's wh...

To the boy—the occurrence—that hounds my dreams still. You had to have known the way my skin cindered beneath yours, and still, I held you. I chased you then and I chase you now, in the form of closure. Incongruous with all things tangible, it would seem that I chase nothing.  Unwillingly, you occupy my conscience. Against fate, I can still recall the delicacy of your touch. In vain, my heart beats, and however you materialize, my breath seeks you. I move on in strata, in seams. In a literary sense, in the seams to each anthology I penned. Allegorically speaking, my healing looks more like layers of the Earth; defined, veering, and known to erode over time—unlike you, forever existing in manuscript.  How does it feel knowing I made you immortal? That while you've become eternal, I've become a paradox? That is, I'm still alive, but it doesn't feel like it. I hold liberty to my name but remain bound to yours and in a multiverse of word and theme, my pen remains loyal to ...