different places

11/7/13

we're coming from different places.
he with a heart wrapped in scars but love's eye saw something in me.
in me.
in this entity he'd reached out to from his past,
a girl who'd become a woman,
who'd found happiness and confidence,
who'd found room in the home of her heart wrapped in scars
to see something in him.

but waiting is a dangerous game.

he proceeded.
she never lied.
but she failed to remember how her
mind
worked.
how she needed to see, hear, smell, touch, taste
and let that seep into her
perspective.

they failed to define what it meant to be friends.
and so with their half communicated expectations
they wandered too far into the realm of
future and possibility
and dreams of stability
that it was easy to ignore the obvious obstacles
keeping them from being together.
two bodies in the same space.
could their minds occupy a shared place?

and what does it mean to love, anyway?
because she felt that.
that urge to say "i love you" at the end of conversations
as if it took more effort to keep it in
rather than breathe it through her words into the phone.

his routine took place under heavy supervision
in a city that might accommodate a man with determination
but had already failed a man whose childhood
lacked nearly everything
he needed to develop a sense of worth and wonder.
it was the same city
where she'd started out.
even without, perhaps, as drastic the reasons
he might have used to get out--
she left it willingly because she wanted to start over
an hour away
where back roads wound alongside creeks and fields
and the electricity didn't hum all around her
where it didn't seem so busy
so polluted
so loud.
she escaped and he was
there trying to start over
for the first real time.