I called you last night. Because I saw the picture, because I wanted to know if your voice still sounded like Saturday mornings with closed blinds, an old truck with the windows down on the highway in the sticky-hot Western sun. Yes, you did. Your voice brought me to all the places I’d been…
Catalog
Marisa Donnelly
Marisa Donnelly graduated Summa Cum Laude from Waldorf University in May 2015 with a B.S. in Secondary English Education, a B.A. in English, and a B.A. in Creative Writing with endorsements in Secondary Reading and Coaching. She is a Midwest-born, West Coast-based writer, poet, essayist and licensed teacher working as a full-time Staff Writer and Editor/Producer for Thought & Expression Co.
Saying goodbye was like inhaling oxygen like a knot wrapped around my ribs untying, loosening, releasing, opening, learning to breathe again.
You leave because you don’t love him. You leave because you do.
You leave because your heart will ache if you stay even if your bones will ache when you go.
I can’t stop running from all the people I shouldn’t be running from.
Maybe we’ll always be connected across the expanse of space and sky, and when I lift my head from the pillow, you’ll feel my energy too. You’ll wonder why you’ve felt so restless ever since I left.
Our connection is paper thin—or, like sutures, weaving through the sinews of my heart, stitching fragments of you to me, of me to you to your chest cavity, laying claim, filling those hollow spaces, making you whole so you won’t miss me, haven’t missed me since I’ve been gone.
I wonder if you know I still think about you every time I drive the gravel backroad where we first kissed, electricity between us sparking white against that night sky like fireflies.
you were the only man who made me believe even those born to run might learn to slow down.
You will always remind me of late nights on I-35, Three Musketeers bars melting chocolate all over my fingers and you laughing, leaning in to kiss the sweetness from my lips.
He made her the sun. But now he chases the moon, looking for the same light from a duller star.
Go. Run. Leave. For you were not born to stay still.
I’ve been smiling at temporary faces looking into temporary eyes kissing temporary lips touching temporary bodies searching for you.
We ache for the zing of a strawberry when we can no longer taste the seeds— like remembering you, bitter and beautiful on my tongue.
Sometimes I wonder if beginnings have endings or if endings are only beginnings of something else.
If I could give you my heart like an atlas, I’d let your fingers trace the highways, the veins that make the backroads, the creeks, pauses where you’ve taken my breath.
If you are the wind, I am a dandelion seed, twisting spinning, caught in your embrace, traveling miles, seeing a sky I’d never dreamed.
I stayed in the street and stared into the expanse. A sky that promised new beginnings with every flickering star.
But in all the white, the steady rhythm of heartbeat and bare soles on pavement, I am found.
Long and liquid words like wounds reopening, spilling blood across the surface of each page. I wrote every secret, every hope, every wish, confessing how my lips still long to be kissed by yours.