My Heart Is Home Alone

By

I’ve got an earthquake trapped inside of my chest. Hiding under the desk, waiting for it to tear this whole house apart. Keep my head down, all while the shaking starts. From the foundation up, it all moves and grooves to a beat I can’t hear. With each anxious breath I draw, there’s another crash. Plates, pictures, dreams of the future, it’s all falling, failing to hold its own against the convulsing ground. I am panicking in this quaking, shaking place. Every single second makes me feel less safe. All while nature is knocking on my minds front door, I wish it was you instead.

I am alone. 

Somewhere between the home that I used to own and the future that I used to hold, I am there with an earthquake in my heart. I could be crushed today and found dead tomorrow, but all I can think about is why this hurts so badly.

My pulse is sending out seismic waves, and I knew if you’d come back I could find my grounding again. I’m trying to patch the floors as they keep cracking, trying to staunch some invisible bleeding. I wish you’d put the bandaid on my bleeding heart.Help turn my earthquake into a tremble.Something that just makes me feel dizzy before it passes. You make me feel dizzy too, dizzy that I’m still falling off this cliff for you.

I fall,

fall,

fall,

and break my back on the ground floor of my feelings. All the feelings are there because of you, but all I can do is sit and think about why this hurts so badly.

I think it’s because I was searching for a home, and you seemed like a good place to rest. Because we’re all a little bit homeless, even in our own homes. Houses are what we’ve made them to be, but without you mine feels a whole hell of a lot more lonely.

Without you there is no shelf of pictures to build together. Without you there’s no mud clean off of our shoes from our wild travels. Without you the paint on the walls hasn’t been tended to, and the dust that’s settled… Oh, I hope you haven’t settled too. Settled into something new. I think that is why this hurts so badly.

I’m afraid that somewhere else, you’re building a new house with someone new. Someone new who doesn’t know you from the boards he’s putting up. He doesn’t know that you hate skee-ball more than Christmas. But he’s already laid the carpet. He doesn’t know that you need black coffee at five so you don’t fall asleep by six. But he’s already started putting up the wallpaper. He doesn’t know that it rattles your bones how other lovers wanted you for only the siding on your beautiful house. He does not know the shape of the pain that you’ve held inside. He’s peeking in windows that I have already climbed through.

Your beautiful soul is worth all the quakes, all the terrible trembles that my heart could ever ache.

I know the shaking will stop. But part of me doesn’t want it to. All of me wants you to be under this table holding my hand. I know why this hurts so badly.