I’m at your apartment without you, but I’m too drunk to spy, to care about photo albums of your past, to search for love letters, and sad coupons with penned promises.  I’m in your bed, waiting for your return, listening to Damien Rice, and for the first time in my life, I’m not wondering who has been through this bed, as you’re on your way home to me.  “In a cab,” you texted.  I know you’re on your way, but even if you were gone for longer, for hours, days, months… we’d be okay.  I’d never do years, knowing neither of us would do well trying to do alone together.  I’m not built that way, to do alone together.  I wasn’t built for long distance.  I can do sprints, short term, or long term together, but expecting long distance is expecting too much.  Life’s too short for it.  I live mine in a series of moments.  I can do month to month, like a lease, but a long-term commitment when “next” means “months from now”… I’ll never be able to do it. 

“Then it’s not love.  If it were, you’d wait.”  Sorry, no.  I just don’t buy that.  I wasn’t built that way, to sustain on promises of sometime.  I need now, a pacifier, a life for now that will lead into then and them.  I won’t live in sorrow, based on borrowed words for our tomorrow.  I need now, and if you can’t give it, I’m gone, not to punish but to live.  I need to live, and that means now, not tomorrow. 

I spend too much time worrying you’ll die, or I’ll die.  I want you to know, if I never get to say goodbye, that you’re my dreams.  You’re my future.  You’re my family.  And a part of me worries I’ll die before I get to say those words.  That people won’t know how important you are to me, because we didn’t get there yet.  I worry the world won’t know, that you won’t know, that you’re all I’ll ever need.  I want that chance to tell you, to show you, what you are to me, my family in months. 

When we fight, I worry the time is being thrown in balls that hit the plate.  I worry we’ll run out of time, and no matter how right I ever feel in our arguments, feeling adrift always feels wrong.  I need you to know that you’re my equal, and that I want to give you the world.  What scares me most, is not death, it’s dying without your knowing what you mean to me, without everyone knowing that they should love you just as they love me.  I want to spend my life with you, what I’ve left of it.  Philip Steven Beer.  I want whatever I have left, to give and share with you.  But I won’t share this with you because you’ll think they’re words, drunken letters. 

This, however, is everything I feel but won’t say because life is too short, or too long.  As life would have it, I’ll outlive this, these moments of apologies, of declarations, and it won’t matter.  I’ll be the only one to read this.  It would be found; it will be re-revealed.  A love of mine, that perhaps lasted longer than it ought to have, or not long enough.  Either way, the love part is honest.  And it will always be home.