You are more likely to be found in the places where your flesh recedes from your bones than in any town plotted eye-of-a-needle small on maps painted in candy-colored pastels. I know you in the hollow stretches between ribs, under cheekbones, around kneecaps; I know you in the rancid scent of alcohol on someone's breath disguised by Tic-Tacs that rattle like the pill bottles collected on your bedside table. Once upon a time, before you swam so far into yourself that I couldn't find you, you were something holy. The patron saint of perfection, in t-shirts and ratty cutoffs and Converse All-Stars. Once upon a time, you were a constellation. I could find myself in the palm of your hand and navigate my way north from the guidelines written in birthmarks and freckles along your spine and collarbone. But once they started to protrude from your melted-wax body, I found myself lost. No compass could guide my out of the terrain that was you and your sadness. It was your sadness that possessed the uncanny ability to swallow a sun whole, leaving me in the dark.

I lit lamps and lived inside of you. Told stories like Scheherazade inside of you. Set up camp and grew a family, all while living in the chamber of your heart that beat thumping rhythms of earthquakes. Some nights, your tears turn into torrential rain storms. Others, the heaving of your breaths create tornado-winds. You are a walking natural disaster: fascinating and dangerous and volatile. Not everyone knows how to love something terrifying and annihilating. Not everyone wants to try.