Bookstores were always special to us

back when there used to be bookstores and

there used to be us

every Sunday the departments were compartments and

I went where the wild things were not to

cuddle you with pictures of

novels that had the prettiest green covers and

innocent journals I would have ruined a thousand times with half the words I typed to you and

ludicrous lewd passages from things I read before the things I stole from you became my diet

we loved bookstores because we loved our books whole but

books are real and take up space and as much as

we craved the feel we had crowded lives so

we made do with just the insides and expected that to work

that’s the reason there are no more bookstores and

there is no more us

I wrote you the sweetest bookstore fantasy years ago and

though I know you hold an advanced degree in applied deletion maybe you held that too

now I’m writing about a bookstore dream

imagined in a city full of imagined meetings but never like this

a real dream of a bookstore with stacks of floors and an open heart where our excited particles collide by chance

then divide by design because we conspired to hurt no one but ourselves

we practice ignoring from a distance then find our island at a table in the middle 

it’s a display of new non-fiction and the same old story

a few moments side by side with our backs to our lives and

then apart again without a touch and without a goodbye

that’s the end and I hope allegories I make awake don’t slap as hard

the premises had promise but the premise was a clichéd ache

just a lazy copy-paste from your pick of over three thousand days

including this one if I’m being honest or at least more accurate because

the truth of it is that the links didn’t disappear when the big chains went bust

there are still bookstores

I had a dream about you last night.

It was a bad one, the kind that leaves me shaken when I wake up.

(If I’m being honest every dream of you is that kind of dream, even the best ones)

In the dream I was like a ghost.

Not that I was dead: I was just like Patrick fucking Swayze in the movie.

I could see what you were doing, but I couldn’t communicate, couldn’t interact.

(Not much different from the way things are right now)

In the dream you were getting ready to go offshore.

I didn’t know what that meant, whether you were leaving the country or moving to an island

(Sorry it hurt to write that let alone think it)

or what.

I just knew that when you went where you were going I couldn’t follow, even as Patrick fucking Swayze.

Dread. Panic. Despair.

I had a dream that you were going offshore, and I am lost at sea.