We don't say goodbye.

I knew exactly what love looked like
in seventh grade.

Love wore his hair a bit too long
and his eyes a bit too dangerous,
love liked to play with fire and
had a past spun of smoking guns and
bloodstained bullets.

Love belonged to my pages
like I belonged to his words;
he'd tell me he was better off kept
in between ink and paper and the dreams
of an abandoned thirteen-year old.

Love never left me out in the cold
but held my bony hands in his scarred ones
and left me paper cuts that he could kiss,
each one a new story
that he would sing to me before I slept.

Love was charming, but he wasn't always kind -
sometimes he'd hurt me with
old skeletons and new faces,
and I used to bleed before I realized
saying goodbye only hurts the people
who are too afraid to say hello again.

Love stayed in between the pages, and
he stayed the same, always changing,
eyes always a different shade of broken,
voice always a different flavor of magic -
and I grew up, turning the pages
just to meet him all dressed up in a new story.

Love stayed beneath printers' ink,
and I grew up inside my skin - I grew into dreams
and I grew into madness, loud and lonely,
I grew into fumbling words and
ribs that showed when I inhaled too deeply.

One day I thought I'd forgotten love,
locked up as he was in between sheets
of paper that held all the creases
of my flightless childhood - I thought I'd
left him to gather dust and that familiar shade of sepia.

One day I thought I'd gotten too old for love,
too tired and too hungry for the kind of affection
you can't always take from faded ink
on white paper - I thought I'd grown too much
and his words wouldn't fit me anymore.

Turns out I hadn't forgotten love, and he
still fit me like supernovas fit the crevices of the sky -
and so in all my most desolate moments I turned to him,
running toward his smooth silhouette,
his name in my lungs and his words in my veins.

I ran on broken glass and broken dreams,
I ran like forest fires were chasing me, racing me
to a finish line I could only see through my tears,
and when I finally caught up to him
he would turn and say, hello again.