Envy is the bread and butter of our relationship
Because you speak jealousy in your touch
And I find excuses to gawk at other couples,
Searching for instructions on how to leave you.

My scrapbook of us is recklessly constructed
Like a ransom note of borrowed sentiments –
‘I love you’ pieced together from
Words I meant to say or said too softly,

To the waiter who screwed me in the back of the kitchen
Or my quasi-first love, now a dentist in Dayton.
For the sensation of digging bare toes into warm sand
Or a face-plant in snow to pretend the world had gone white.

Your scrapbook of us, your ‘I love you’
Suffocates me, derived from rusting artifacts
You scavenged from me while I was sleeping
Or distracted by the sun breaking into our bedroom.

The goodbye note is nothing borrowed, nothing blue.
It is a dedicated declaration of freedom
Whispered, to fall on deaf ears. Because if I don’t try,
Your touch could turn me to stone.