/be my mistake/

if the alcohol didn't get to our head we wouldn't be cramping ourselves inside that white bedsheet. if i wouldn't have stayed the night i would never have felt his fingers inside me. if his heart wasn't blue he would come back and see me again. if my heart wasn't weak i would never write him a poem.

he never kissed me with love but kissed me nonetheless. my skin begging for the pain that comes with being touched, eyes locked at the sight of his fingers wrapped around my neck. i could tell him then, how he's showing me colors i've never seen. but we were built on borrowed time. he wasn't mine to hold.

on a list of 'things i wanted to tell him but didn't' i have thirty seven different anagrams of the same desperate pleading. i listen to his voice on repeat and how he loved how my hair smells. i reach out towards the end of my empty bed, hoping to feel what i felt in his arms. who would tell him that i left a piece of me in his blue jays tshirt. who would tell him that i was tracing her name on his shoulder while he kissed mine.

he held me and let me go within seconds and minutes. buried his face in my locks just long enough for me to pretend how he wasn't the anthology of all the things i wanted. how the line was drawn at holding, while i tried to erase the memory of everyone who has touched me before. how i got to hold him for hours but would never get to keep him.

his cold hands under my tshirt, and the traces of him on my skin, sighs and smiles in the dark while he showed me glimpses of what i could have had if the timing was right. there were three of us in that bed- him and i and a heavy weight we carried of our past. there were three layers between us- his clothes and mine and an uncertainty that made all the difference in the world.

he didn't look at me with love, or an intensity that made me think of if i had a place inside him; but he looked nonetheless. like i was a painting he wasn't supposed to paint but painted anyway, only to leave it halfway through after the alcohol washed off. days after i am haunted by the memory of it, wondering if it was the alcohol or impulsivity. days after i am haunted by the thought of him swimming in regrets after showing me utopia.

i pause at the whiff of any perfume that smells close to his. or at his name- reeking of ordinariness and familiarity. while august slips away, in my head we are still twisted in bedsheets. I cancel my plans and write and rewrite texts. I flinch at someone else's touch and cry because i will never have more of him. I cry in his empty room because i hate his feigned geniality. icy words smothered in the warmth of the sun, while i let the insides of my mouth and heart dry up.

i know the ache will subside, and bittersweet reminiscence will take over, and i will see it as what it has always been a doleful mistake, misplaced on a haystack of fallacious decisions. fragments of my heart scattered around an august monday, and an array of instances that ended with my face buried in his chest. a cigarettes after sex playlist and conversations about beige trousers and ysl cologne and my hand inside his tshirt while he sleeps and holding back and giving in and falling apart on his fingers and the same static words in my head again that i know it wasn't love it wasn't love it wasn't love.

it wasn't love. it never was. but it was pretty close.

nibir/for a moment i was heaven struck