“I dreamed I forgot you/but to dream you was remembering.”
—Leila Chatti, “I Dreamed I Forgot”

It’s a privilege to say goodbye. This is what I told
myself when I woke and learned you were gone, back before I knew
I would survive. I was young then, alone
in a lab-grown womb, no mother nor human proxy to speak of.
Learned the uses of a body in a windowless room.
I’ve got bad nostalgia for it all. Loneliness made sense then.
Not now, among the living, pretending I never left.
It’s okay. I can’t complain. I go to work, go to school,
come home, say I’d rather kill myself than go
to the grocery store, and go to the grocery store.
This is not to say I am insincere. I mean
it all. I climbed to the rooftop
because I wanted to fall. Been touched
by so many strangers, I can’t bear it from the people I love.
Like a dead language, I want to be known
but I don’t know how. Can’t stop making plans
for the past, can’t bear the filthy aperture between my legs,
the angry white light of the world as it reopened for me
but not you. Last I saw you, leaves drifted, hypnotic,
to the icebound ground. Corner of your mouth
occupied by a cigarette, the other a joint,
smoke pouring from each orifice like an apartment fire,
you said Some things never change and I agreed,
although this did. You are never alive in my poems.
For this, I cannot forgive myself. Last night, I had a smoke
on the roof and thought of you,
our last apple cider, November then and now, autumn air
so sharp my blood slowed to a crawl like commuters
in the one-way tunnel of the heart, cold as the night you told me
you felt like you were dying, which you turned out
to be right about, if only just that once.