A book I read once (I don't remember the name) talked about two people being the best and closest kind of friends, the kind of friends who used to be lovers.
I found places for the time that I used to spend with you, talking to you, thinking about you. There is no place for all the love I have. It's yours and I can't give it to anyone else, and I can't stop having it either. It makes me think about how mothers who lose their babies still have breasts full with milk for them, painfully full, leaking every time they hear a screaming kid on the bus. And what an awful chore, pumping that breast milk--because you have to, because it hurts so--for a baby who never got to nurse. I know I am the one who killed the baby in this scenario, but still it breaks my heart and cracks my chest to pour out all this milk on the ground.
But what do I do with all of my knowing-you? What do I do with all of my knowing you?
Right now I keep it. I hide it away. Like the poem, "I cannot live with you / it would be life / and life is over there / behind the shelf."
I would give it back to you if I could, because I don't think you want me to have it anymore, but I'm glad that I can't.
Maybe one day it could make us the best and closest friends. In one of these possible worlds, we are that, still.
