The Line Collapsed (Revisited)

a rewritten version of my first poem about two souls separated at birth, yearning for each other, and the surviving with the impossible hope of finding each other

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introduction:

this poem is about a personal belief that soulmates exist - no matter where they are, how they are, what state they’re in. they exist, they loved you deeply even if they’re dead. everyone is loved. i love you.

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If God bound us together at birth
then somewhere in the distance
your lungs falter and gasp
when mine forget how to breathe

do you wake five minutes before sunrise
with smoke trapped in your linen sheets
while a fireplace
burns in my chest

when winter descends at your doorstep
does it arrive with the sound of my feet?
And every tenth of December
I feel you wearing the wind

sometimes I stand outside
and catch the stars in the blacks of my eyes
I watch my breath form clouds in the air
and disappear into the cold

I pray that the warmth in my chest
passes you on the way back to me

I spend years
holding my ears to cans with a string
It pulls gently on every birthday
it hums at every funeral
and it at its peak
at the end of every winter

my fingertips trace
every line on the bark of your birch tree
the leaves rustle and the sound fades
the light dims a little every night

the wooden fingerprints
trace through centuries
it learned our parents
then it learned our names

it followed the sound of your voice
and it reached mine
by traveling the thread
tied between us

your silent string became a cemetery
when I must’ve been dreaming
it stopped pulling and I stopped believing

and slowly
your thread became infinity

if they’ve buried you with the string
and I arrived before hope
I hope someone remembered
your favorite flowers

if they didn’t
I’ll carry them with shaking hands
and I’ll cut your grass before it grows
planting hydrangeas in your name

every night
I’d count the stars
and split my lunch between us
the way we should have done
if love found us
before your beauty
petrified a graveyard

and if God decides
to stitch us back together
let my hands learn
your beautiful face
instead of the soft kiss of dirt

that envelops your gravestone

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let me know if i should rewrite some of my older poems - i’ll leave a link to my older poem - the one that inspired that’s a refined version of this poem → here

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