In choosing karmic debt

My curled hands splinter the outside of long-rotted dendral intentions, still uncalloused in every meaning, bleeding with needless profusion while loud voices with distant faces call for compromise. Their rationale rains softly, choosing a slow rust over a quick acid burn when neither is helpful. Breaking bread alone leads to dry mouth, the way viewing a single constellation cannot constitute stargazing. The person I love knew more about the black hole at the center of it all than suburban deer and rabbits know all planted objects to be food. And so can you blame me if I’m feeling a little bit unhinged, if I cannot watch long movies, if I can’t sleep until the sun burns the stars out of the sky?

So you’ve also seen the person you love pass you by on the crosswalk at midnight and then stop when you stopped; you recall that you both cried, that you both smelled terrible, but you crushed into each other because the weight of the world wasn’t anyone’s fault, something you both realized right away, but felt guilty for, and then, in that moment, you both promised to never forget what was real, and then a few weeks later you neuroticized a text asking you to come over as a slight comparing you to their friends and everything fell apart even as you both remembered every single, perfect, beautiful thing, and you still think about it and how you can’t know if they do and you’re happy meeting new people every day, until you get home and realize you only care about a single person who no longer exists.