Eucalyptus

i. Blue is the color of my veins, but lately I've been pumping more black than red, more maybes than yeses, more footsteps than flight patterns.

ii. I started counting that very first night. My shirt plaid, buttons escaping from their holes like necks slipping from their flannel nooses. Your eyes were high beams going the wrong direction on a one-way street, and I knew that this was going to be different.

iii. When you said goodbye instead of goodnight, I felt the butterflies die in the gas chambers of my heart.

iv. It rained today, drowned worms lying limp, guts spilled like secrets on the leaf-slick sidewalk. I paused beneath an oak, with my eucalyptus hair and kohl-smudged eyes, waiting for one of those metal-winged beasts roaring overhead to bring you to me.

v. However long it takes me to forget the sound of your voice, to fall back into the quilt of my own speech patterns instead of yours.

vi. You are my favorite song.

vii. The grit in my teeth from when I tripped and fell too many times trying to keep up.

viii. Your heartbeats sound like gunshots and I swear I'll swallow every single bullet.

ix. You are the folded corner of a page in a book I haven't yet finished reading.