1.

I went through your junk drawer. I figured maybe the paper lining of your butterfly wings or the steady pulsing of your ex-lovers’ jellyfish tentacles would mean more to me than your public parts. Than the trinkets you pin to your sleeves or the Post-it notes you slip into my pockets when you kiss me against warm stove tops.

2.

The first time you kissed me was in December, four days before Christmas. You tasted like almonds and I’m not sure if my warmth was coming from the hand on my thigh or the candy canes and Billie Holiday that tinted the air around my ears. It wasn’t the first time I’d been kissed. I’d exchanged oral sentiments under the influence of smoke and the direction of empty Pepsi bottles, and there was that girl I kissed for a very long time because she had clean sneakers and dimples that made me really want to be in love with her. It only took two fingers to pull the blinds closed. The glow-in-the-dark temporary tattoos I’d been carrying in my pocket made me feel very unprepared.

3.

There was a night you fell asleep with your back bleeding sympathetic, lethal spider bites into my skin. I felt guilty that my rough gawkiness overcast your soft brilliance. That night I dreamed about being a beekeeper. There’s a coffee shop in Tallahassee with a porch that wraps all the way around the back, covered in picnic blankets and checkerboards. Of all the ordinaries who find their way to those blinking neon vines, I’m always the youngest and the most sober. The owner makes his own honey. He sells it in the bay window under blue and yellow plaid curtains. He says he loves being a beekeeper. Almost as much as he loves getting drunk and flying kites.

4.

The nakedness of our transgressions made me wish everything would just lay still suspended in pale tangerine light so I could try and understand why the only things we have in common are the raindrops in our spines.

5.

All I found in your junk drawer were old “I miss you” letters bound in yarn, creased at the center and tinted around the edges from sliding them in and out of your coat pocket.

6.

Your fingers are always cold. Even that night I told you that I loved you. You were sleeping and I thought I’d counted every freckle but I saw one I’d never noticed before. I loved you in that moment. Maybe only in that moment. But I loved you because I knew there were parts of you I’d never get to see. Did you know that if your fingers are cold it means I’ve succeeded in making your heart beat too fast? F