Evidence
I hate you.
For making a map
out of my hands.
For leaving me to wander a country that was never mine,
stopping at every green thing
as though you might be hidden
somewhere behind it.
I follow roads
I will never walk.
I stand, in my mind,
beside a lake I have never seen
and wonder whether you ever stood there too.
Whether the same water
once held your reflection.
Whether you have watched the sea
from somewhere along that coast
and thought of nothing at all,
while years later,
someone you have left behind
would find herself staring at it
as though the water
might know something of you.
I hate you
for how soft this has made me.
How easily I have begun
loving a place
simply because
it has known you.
Show me the trees,
and I will wonder
which of them have known your shadow.
Show me the rain,
and I will imagine
it falling once
on your shoulders.
Give me a road
and tell me it belongs to your home,
and I will love the road.
I do not even need proof.
That is the worst of it.
I do not need to know
that you have been there.
I only need to believe
that perhaps,
at some point,
you might have.
Anything.
A shoreline.
A green path.
A lake.
A city whose name
I cannot say
without thinking
of your mouth.
Anything
that might have touched you
before it reached me.
Because I think
I am afraid
that if I cannot keep
some small piece
of the world that holds you,
one day
you will disappear completely,
and I will have nothing left
to prove
that you were ever here.
