I can't wait for you to come home.

You think I won’t leave when you are sleeping. I won’t. I have drug chains around my living room for days. I carry them mostly now. You know. I want you to remember me. I want you to remember how hard things are for me now and how hard they were then. Can you see me with my arms full of chain, the real exasperation as I try to spread mayonnaise on toast, how the toast slides on the counter under the knife cuz I only have the hand full of chain with the knife sticking out to spread with, how I am blessed and a genius for even managing that, how hard I still try despite all of it?

If I was here to hit you I would. Your smug remembrance, you are so distracted in your love for me. If it was up to you, you would keep the good and forget the bad. If I lay beside you would you tell me the same? Would you use a knife to say it?

“I love most of you so much.” You’d want to say.

I have news for you in the making. Leave your cat, that’s right, go to work, cry a few times when a song plays, when my NAME comes up, adjust your chair, your vacancy, your face. I am gonna kill your cat when you leave.

I have watched you now for two hundred hours straight. How long is that? Don’t know? I do, I just lived it. You will not be forgiven for sneaking like a cat, for coming in that day like a burglar, not for sneaking like one, or pretending to be, but for not saying your name, mine, what? Hello? You could have said, Babe are you there? Instead the door pushes open and I sit up in my bath. You hated them. I had put all of that crystalized menthol in it. I suppose anything can be crystalized. I read one third a cup. The thing was the size of three cans of soda. I did it intentionally. My coffee mug, the small one, I broke it against the floor like a beer bottle in some degenerate alley fight. The handle held there in my hand, my knife. Did I lunge? No one said it. No one said he went into shock. That he knocked the cup over, passed out. It’s like saying Lincoln kicked a chair in reflex as he went over the balcony dead. Not, hey I bet he kicked that chair cuz as he was going over, as he was realizing in an instant that the rest of himself was in catapult and headed to the floor some thirty, no twenty feet below, that his leg, his left leg was gonna be the last part of him to have any effect in this world beyond him hitting the floor dead, that he kicked the shit out of that chair, once, his only shot, he timed it, he did it perfectly while brain still flew from the front of his face. I held that cup handle like a knife half knowing it was you.

Watch me remember everything. Watch me see the peace you sleep with and lay it against you like logs to burn you with. Watch me measure the words you give to strangers now that I am not there to be hustled along or rancored with sweat and indecipherable glances. I watch you grow that thing every day, like a hope that has just begun living only it’s not hope, its real. Too good for me or like a weed grown now that I am not there, my feet on the earth that hides it, a seed while I was living, unfed by slack and yet panacea to my grave, a longing in you even then.

You always held wisdom like a wet torch. Not even god would go to work for you. To think of the things I shake now though surely they can only be for me. It’s like you always knew the angle of our repose. Short legged, screaming in the kitchen, fights counted by torn pictures and thrown rings. Tore everything you could but me, wishing everything torn was.

Look back and remember the good, forget the bad, that’s right, I will remember myself for you and baby, I can’t wait for you to come home.