just some words.

and when they talked about being born with a word on your tongue, you were the one who came to mind. you must have swallowed stardust from all the nights under the skies and sometimes there is evidence in the way you shatter, piece by piece, when the morning awakes. you have secrets too deep for dawn and a soul too rich for afternoon, when everything is pale blue shadows and pastel like easter eggs dipped too briefly.

tell me about the summer, you say, and I tell you of freckles and a butter yellow sun and the way my hair smells of salt. no. there is a shake of your head and your eyes are melting, freezing, melting in this shifting snow and sun of february. tell me about what it is, not what it has. there is an easiness to you that helps loosen my tongue and I am quick to spill words and spread my cards over the table, carefully, explaining each move. see! this is my hand. somewhere between the story about how I almost fell in the lake and to how I cried flying home last summer, you found the cracks in me I patched haphazardly from cataloguing every sunrise.

is that where home is, you ask, again, and for a minute, I am grateful that you have seen all the raw parts of me and are not afraid. the words find my tongue, it was, but I swallow them. I am content with sunsets and sand on my skin and cheap coffee to keep me driving, white knuckled at two in the morning. one thing you will never learn is that halfway home is no place at all and I cannot trade the blue blue sky stretched tight for the shadows of starlight, no matter how much they shimmer.