If there was ever any question, you would

gently tip its body back and secure

it against your chest, carry it

outside, release it on some frozen patch

of dirt, not actually knowing if

it could survive out there. Let's go

for a drive, you would say,

and I'd shrug, like there was a place

we might get to where we knew each other

as well as we had faked the knowing

all those years. I loved to make up

stories in my head about myself, alone,

lost in sadness, and no one

would save me, and I was on a highway

curving through many beautiful mountains

in a steadily curling morning mist.

A brash practicality would lash at me

if I let it, little throbbing waves of pain.

I keep saying I was unhappy,

but I was not unhappy. I was trapped,

and the crushing of my spirit lived in me.

Only you had the courage to stop it.

I would have gone on forever, so innocent

and murdered, never, I believed, having

hurt a soul. Let's be in love, you

would say, and I'd laugh: that's what

we're doing, right? with my noncommittal

rolling through the car like the thick,

heavy air of clouds about to burst. Like

the way you'd interrupted my real life

with your voice and your needs. I

would be trying to find some meaning in

it all, in a movie you couldn't even watch.