Sometimes I sit and stare at the coils of the bunk above me
tracing their weaving pattern as if they were some sort
of pathetic man-made constellation.
And I think of all the ridiculous ways I compare you to others.

Because you promised to be everything and everyone.
You were somewhere between the beauty of Eden and the harsh truth of the apple,
begging me to take a bite so we could escape from what we had created.
So you would no longer be just one of my missing ribs
carved into something that I fell hopelessly in love with.
And we would go to some gloomy flat on the east side of town
where even the windowsills shatter and you can practically smell the death of dreams
mixed with a hint of track filled arms and seven shots of cheap jack.
Where gunshots scream through walls as if they were the headlines of the Sunday paper,
and where the sunrises and sunsets were somehow always a breathtakingly banal shade of grey.
But none of that mattered, because in you was everything.
And in you was nothing.
It seemed as if somewhere in between hell and home I had lost you,
you who had so easily become an enigma of someone I had once thought would stay.
So I searched for you, as if you were a missing pearl and if I could find you
we could make something whole and beautiful again.
And I searched for decades, for centuries, even for millennia;
I witnessed the moon swallow up the sun and the stars turn the same color as your eyes
the ocean burned up until it was as dry as the Gobi and the sky was somehow the same exact texture of the floor in our two room flat.
And it was only then as I looked into the never ending ripples of the
once strong oak that I knew that you never wanted to be found.
And I lost myself, somewhere between the dark metal constellations of the bunk above me
and the dream that we could be together for what I claimed
was our share of eternity.

———-
Grayson Herrgott is a 19 year old student at Michigan State University. Throughout the past 3 years, they have struggled with issues including sexuality.