A love letter from those of us who keep leaving.

1) Every morning for one hundred and eighty-six days, you wrote the word breathe on my inner thigh so that the most tender part of me will remind both you and I to stay alive.

2) When we first met, I told you that my foot was tired of always holding the door half-open in case I needed to flee. You told me you were a runner – you’d catch up.

3) Of all the things I didn’t believe in, you said my lack of faith in love was the only thing that made me blasphemous. You kissed my hands and said you’d help me repent.

4) I have called your hips a temple and fallen to my knees in prayer three times a day for one hundred and eighty-six days. I have named your lips confessional booths and whispered into them all the sins I intended to commit in your name. I was born-again.

5) Your eyes committed massacres on every inch of my skin they fell on.

I accepted martyrdom with a smile.

6) Last week, I told you that I had blisters all over my feet from searching for feeling in these hollowed out streets. I told you that I had given myself wholly to roads that led me nowhere, but I ended up at your doorstep and fuck if that wasn’t the heaven at the end of my hell of a tunnel. You told me you would never let me go.

7) I told you that wasn’t what I was afraid of.

8) You always knew that my hands were too unstable to hold you, but still I have called you sticky sweet – said you stuck me back together with the sugar on your tongue, said you licked the fucked up right off of me the moment your lips met my skin.

You didn’t always believe what I told you.

So I tell you over and over; I mean everything I say.

9) Please don’t let me let you go.

10) My mother told me that I was diagnosed with insomnia at six years old. Fifteen years later, when I cannot sleep: I call your body my scripture and run my fingers through the braille of your skin; count the holy cells of your body until I can finally rest.

11) In your skin cells lie answers to every question I have ever asked myself.

12) One night, I whispered that I bet you’ve never seen a full moon, and that I bet that every time you’ve looked at a night sky, you were greeted by a crescent.

I’ve never told you why.

13) Forgive me;

I have always been lost and wandering.

14) Forgive me;

I can not get myself to sit still.

15) Please forgive me; I really thought naming your neck home would mean I’d always come back.

16) One hundred and eighty-six days ago, when you told me you were a runner, my feet started training every night when we were asleep to make sure you’d never catch up to me.

17) But I was still heartbroken when I looked behind me and saw you were so far back, it looked like the sunset had swallowed you.

18) I’m sorry I had to go. I’m sorry all the work you’ve put into me hasn’t paid off.

19) Forgive me, Lover, for I have sinned because:

20) Even though I meant everything I ever said,

21) I still couldn’t get myself to stay.

22) But I don’t want you to forget me. (Please, please, never forget me.)

23) So, my former darling, when you look up,

24) And you find another crescent,

25) (It’s because even God can’t stop smiling at your face.)