Take me where the light is.

Take me to the morning.
I haven’t seen the sun in thirty weeks and
I am thirsty for the daylight.
Help me find a glow.
Crack open a window, darling,
show me the stars.
Take me on a trip to the galaxies not at
all close to here, far
and away and illuminated.

Take me where the light is.

Take me to the dawn.
Endless nights I have spent here wishing
for a ray, a flicker.
Light me a candle.
Pour gasoline on everything I thought I loved
and start a fire, baby, let it all burn.
Spark something inside of me,
make me a flame.
Make me a forest fire.

Take me where the light is.

Show me it exists.
Show me it hasn’t run out. Tell me you’re
willing to go the distance, say you want to
find it, too. It’s not too late,
you tell me, to bring the flowers
back around. It’s not too late
to water them back to life, you say,
and it sounds like you’re telling me
the truth.
So the next time I say,

take me where the light is,

don’t be afraid. I am still here.
Even in all this darkness and ambiguity,
I might be broken, but I am still here.

When you left, I wanted to come with you.
I think about it still, every breath I take an inconvenience.
When I see you in my sleep, you tell me hearing this makes
you sad. In my dreams, you tell me to remember only the
good times but when you left, my heart,
everything good left, too.
Everything good and beautiful went with you.

When you left, I dug myself a shallow grave next to you.
I was a child again, imitating every little thing you do –
you knew you were always my role model so this was the
most natural thing I could do.
Because you left.

You left. I saw it happen.
I begged you to stay but you couldn’t hear me,
couldn’t see me, you had to go;
and I wanted nothing more than to leave everything
behind and come with you.

Wherever you are, I still would rather be next to you.

If not for me, then for that time you said nothing
was more painful to you than being away from us
and I know,
I know you’re not hurting anymore.
They keep telling me you’re no longer in pain.
But I am still holding your hand in that horrible room
and begging you to stay.
Half a year later, I am still crying at
your feet as I have to watch you leave.

Baba, you always knew I wrote poetry.
And even though you never read any of it, you were always
proud of me.
But what you didn’t know was that you had made my life so
beautiful, so easy –

I had always envied the poet who didn’t have to borrow or
exaggerate pain to write, but now I understand,
now I know,
I would rather have you here than the pain I need to write
this poem.

The places in your heart love leaves,
darkness enters, she says. We’ve
all seen it slither in, filling voids
by creating new ones. I nod this
time. She says it might be our fault.
We’re the ones with our eyes
so open, we haven’t tasted sleep
in decades. Not everyone is like
this. We see it all and we’re fucking
terrified. Aren’t you always just
waiting for the next bad thing, baby?
I see it in your eyes, she says:
you’re waiting for the earthquake,
the hurricane, the explosion, the
next fucking disaster. It’s all you can
think of. There are places in your heart
that are all places, no heart, baby. Why
won’t you let me in? Let me tell you,
darling, you’ve got it all wrong, I swear.
I know I used to have my eyelids stapled
up and down to keep from blinking.
I know when we met, my chest
was always on fire. Always burning,
burning, burned, and by day’s end:
black ash. But then two years ago,
you kissed me for the very first time.
I slept that night. I didn’t even know
it until it was the next morning, sun
erupting out of my chest, blinding me.
Do you remember? The places in my
heart you entered, dark turned to light
and that light turned to us and suddenly,
no voids, no hurricanes, no bad things.

And grief is the first thing we know,
shooting outside of our mothers like cannonballs,
leaving our first homes behind by force,
screaming. And grief follows us even
after, trailing our footsteps like an obsessed lover,
lurking in the shadows, waiting to pounce.
You said you knew what I was talking about.
You said you saw it too. But there are scars
on my body you don’t understand
and they’re making me doubt your honesty.
You said, “Grief takes on too many lovers, baby,”
said, “it’s been inside me, too,” but your skin
is unmarked and mine shivers in anticipation
and I don’t know how to believe a word
you’re saying. Do you remember it, darling?
Do you even know the story? One night, I tripped
and fell into a puddle and Grief made it into an
ocean and we swam together for days on end
until my arms gave in. Does this ring any bells?
Okay, one night, I tripped and fell into an ocean and
Grief swam with me for days on end and my arms
grew stronger by the day. This is the lie I tell
myself. One night, I walked out of my house,
footsteps calculated, careful, sure. I saw an
ocean and I jumped in. Grief was the first
thing I knew and I wanted to unknow it,
so I jumped into an ocean of you and you,
touched by grief but resilient still,
swallowed me up and named the stars
after me. This is the real story: I met you
and everything I had known before you
I had suddenly forgotten. I do not want to fill in
the blanks in my memory.