day 1: here's clutter i won't get rid of

I called you the day it happened to tell you I’d been let go.
In our conversation you told me not to worry about you, you come into contact with five people on a regular basis and you always keep six feet apart when you and your best friends take one of their dogs for a walk.

I couldn’t wait a full week to talk to you again, so I called six days later. An abundance of time and half-a-state’s worth of distance and elevation can do that.

I mentioned the complete shift in my circadian rhythm.
You talked about how you’re learning new technology and the steep learning curve that’s going along with it.

You noted that I will be fine to get outside once in a while and even go grocery shopping every week but that the terror your heart put us through nearly six years ago now puts you at more of a risk. This reminds me of

following the view of your head through the ambulance window all the way to the ER
the trance I was in the rest of that day
the wheels that replaced my feet as I moved around the school
the fire that burnt down that whole empty house across the street, what, two weeks later, I think
you telling me that you wouldn’t tell your own parents unless something more serious happened
how I fell off the radar in the conversation between me and him for weeks after I’d first kissed him in the parking lot
how I’d fallen away from most other conversations for weeks
how I held back a small tornado behind my mechanical face for the rest of that spring
how it took me so long to open my face and calm that down

and for moments, I wanna say
fuck this,
fuck this city,
fuck it
and move my worn skeleton East if only to watch your every move for a week to make sure your breathing doesn’t change
before I remember I have no way of traveling, even if I wasn’t advised to stay put.

When moving closer to you would put you in more danger than leaving you on your island,
the knot rises from my sternum to my throat, hovering below chin level,
but all anyone would see--if they could see me--is a fair-to-middlin’ level of concern in my eyebrows.

We got so much better after I moved out.
I know it’s a stilted better, I know it’s because what I’m made of
doesn’t stir you into a frenzy
because you don’t have to witness the difference every day
But whatever’s keeping us together is pulling us closer together around an invisible mass of everything I haven’t told you,
which is mixed in with everything you’ve never said.
Arms holding arms holding arms in a circle and unbreathable air keeping us from an embrace, looking like we’re skydiving but with feet on shaky ground. Not falling through the air, yet.

Stuff like this makes me want to pop that bubble. History says to find the right time, like maybe not pit a high stakes situation like being cut away from you in the middle of higher stakes like this.

Not just in pictures anymore, but I look more like you in the mirror every day.