Free Even Though I Don't Miss You by Chelsea Martin Page A

and fought about the chore chart. She said we would never have the same closeness again.
    On her porch I thought she was referring to our proximity, but I was beginning to think she meant something else.
    I said, "What is the story about?"
    It had been a few minutes since you touched my knee, and I wished that you would touch it, and you did touch it, and I felt silly for having wished it, and I wished you hadn't've touched it. You touched it again later and I felt silly again, but to a slightly lesser degree.



Once when we were fighting I went around the apartment pretending to water the plants. When I was done I said, "I've watered all the plants no thanks to you." A few days later I remembered that I hadn't actually watered the plants, and I checked them and they were very dry. I was mad that you hadn't thought of watering the plants, even after the comment I had made a few days prior about you not watering them. So I pretended to water all the plants again and picked a fight with you about how I shouldn't even have to water the plants since they were mostly yours. A few days later I was mad about something else but I checked the plants again. The plants were looking pretty bad so I said, "The plants are dying, I guess I'll water them like always."

I remember I had said, "Do you hate me?"
    And you had said, "Yes." Then you said, "I hate you."
    I drank two full glasses of water, one after the other, because my body couldn't cry while it was drinking water. To believe in evolution is to believe that these kinds of bodily responses have somehow supported the survival of our species.

Before the do-you-hate-me-yes-I-hate-you, I felt like we were living some kind of Truman Show rip-off, in which I was an actor hired to make you believe certain things about your life, and you were Truman, except that you were cognizant the whole time of the fact that I was acting. But we kept living this way because neither of us wanted to talk openly about the situation for fear of what might happen if we were both aware that we were both aware that we were both aware.

I thought I was done writing about you after I did a Find and Replace for your name in all my Word documents and replaced your name with forward-slash. After the Find and Replace, I felt like I was only one person again. It felt bad, like nobody else was me with me. You weren't taking part in my being anymore so I was only myself. I don't know how else to say it.

It didn't turn out to be a very practical choice to do the shitty things I did to you. I didn't consider that I might grow into someone who could no longer rationalize treating someone so poorly. And writing poems isn't really the most efficient way of relieving guilt.
    I want to squint right now to help explain what I'm feeling but this poem can only ever be words.

Please accept this poem as a formal cryptic nameless public half-apology. It means something to me to see the words written out, like I have a choice to believe them or not. So many hundreds of times I've woken up in the middle of the night with this mysterious bad feeling, and when I'm just about to give up trying to place why I feel bad, I think of what I did to you and my heart gets hot. I don't know if for you or for you-in-quotations, which would indicate that I have something more in mind than what is immediately apparent, which I don't really know what that would be, so probably you without quotations.

Maybe it's condescending of me, and further damaging to you, to assume I had an impact on your wellbeing that warrants this kind of nighttime mania. I will add this to my giant list of shitty things I've done to you. In fact, I am prepared to add any number of things to my giant shitty list.

Sometimes the sun is so elusive, like it knows it has a place in my heart. Is it pointless to compare you to the sun? Does it seem inappropriate to describe the sun as haunting ?

I wish you could see all the backspacing and retyping I've done to get here.