The widest concept ever: my true love. We begin with healing, and this, this in itself is the structure of our love. I find you in small pieces -- the rings I wear. I’ve switched them with the weight loss (you’re jealous). I waft in that scent of basil. I hallucinate your voice internally and externally, because I carry you everywhere, like my own little canonized saint. You bear that halo with you everywhere, constructed of cardboard and glow sticks, and I watch others as their eyes trace it, your beams following in a trail. All flaw. All health. All my bosom of love.

I’m about to menstruate. My body waits so I can still comfortably feel you in my womb heart. Here, you heal me. Here, I co-opt and re-own what was stolen from compulsion and drug use. Here, you kiss the inside of my thighs and I watch you, deeply, post coitous fathoming how any bible could condemn this, how long I held myself from this, how much I endured to deserve this.

My favorite sight: brake lights against your tan skin, right around ten at night, when we’re stuck five from home. turn right, turn right, turn right. please turn right. Red bright against your cheeks, illuminating that perfect lip scar, god, you’re like the paintings we see at our nation’s capital, goosebumps on my arm from the air conditioning because the summertime in so damn sticky, and I wish I could capture this but my hands shake. My head fits perfectly in your plush palm. You glide across my chin. I think I could die here.

I can sense it. That Freudian slip. In your bed, I feel my soul levitate from my body and it is so unreal, so alien, it terrifies me. I never wanted to change my name, but each time we brush hands it’s like the first, and in the privacy of my naked bedrest, I cry from manic joy. Almost too full to be solid, I think, one of us has to be liquid. Something has to happen. But no, our foundation is blessings. It began this way, it will conclude this way. This is a promised endgame I’m still earning.

I leave on my first day lithium-free. I can feel again, and I spend that hour and a half on the edge of passing out, outskirts of my body from my sensitive nature and, gently, I take that ring from my thumb to place my hand out the window, inhale the yellowest foliage I’ve seen. Everything is blooming around me, and so am I. So are we. We both have allergies. I know this time is hard. We push through it despite. I imagine you kissing me one last time before my left hook into town.

I ask myself, “where does this highway go?”