you ran a marathon
and i ran away to
live a second life and a third life
where i wore makeup everyday
and rode the Tube to walk over
a city full of Cadbury bars and galleries
and reading Zadie Smiths' White Teeth
for a class where the professor only wore
one t-shirt that said Johnny Cash
in block letters and talked of modern
literature about drugs sex and money
and where I learned about the jam-and-cheese sandwich
from a boy who ate bread stuffed with potato chips,
to live out of a suitcase, actually two suitcases,
to fly on airplanes and get stamps on my passport,
and live again, where I jumped off a bridge and found
solitude
of nature, of mountains, of deserts, of sun and
find you, who gave me so much and a
cat at my bed and a dog that used to
escape, into the streets and make us
go look, and now I am
here, maybe here forever, in a reality that seems
unending, fraught with the haunted whispers of
a past, whose hearts I have
broken, whose traces now make me
with nothing to look back to but pictures
and the emotions breathing at my neck,
to face tomorrow begrudgingly because it
is never-ending and so tiring.
thank goodness I have you
because you let me look
at you.
