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i wonder what you were looking for in the library walls
i was looking for peace in between the titles
(i've found the best walls are porous, and between their gaps,
filled with light) and i picked up
The Taste of Salt by Martha Southgate
A haunting novel about the ways we hurt, and are hurt
by the people we love the most
the first page was a quote from Isak Dineson
The cure for anything is salt water --
sweat, tears or the sea
i discovered your library slip
wedged at the divide
where chapter two ended
and chapter three began
as such passing-ons must
the checked out title on the ripped sheet
was The brief wondrous life of Oscar
but you must have used this as a bookmark
to save your spot
last December, when it was colder, and
you were a different person than you are now
i wondered what caused you to stop there
were you thinking of your brother, too?
when you read: No one has been where I've been.
No one. or was it the question, left, forever, unanswered
you gonna stay clean this time?
i kept reading, tracing my fingers along each line
and imagining that i'm dragging you along, too
Items checked out to: SHERIFFE, SIVAN E
Due Date: 01-12-16
i think about Googling you
it would be easy, you know
it's easy when you have
your own name
but i don't.
i wonder as you read along in my mind's eye
what you would have thought if you'd read
she looked like music and sunshine
what does that even look like? or is it the way
someone makes you feel, a selfish descriptor
the adjective applied that tells you less
about yours than mine
i wonder, Sivan, if you see yourself
as music and sunshine when you flip through pages
and search for peace.
they say that matter reacts to being perceived
that the very act of seeing affects
that a tree that falls in the forest
is different than the tree that is heard
and i wonder if in all the seven billion people
there is someone thinking of me
the way i do, of you, now, anonymous
swallowed in the sea of turgid human thought
and i wonder if I would feel it
if they were.
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