the ceiling was genuinely caving in, our upstairs neighbor's footfalls adorning the crown of my head, while i wash off the day, the oil, the flour, the smell of roasted peppers and rich austinites, the feeling of bald tires on burnet road. a moment of meditation, the inside of my eyelids, burnt taupe. i didn't know i'd wash paint of the same color off your ankles but a month later. i didn't know i'd kiss greece and taste a laboratory. i didn't know neuroscience tasted like ink and love and shoulders.
i didn't know there could be more of you, and if i did, i swear, i would have pulled it out of the soil in our backyard and molded you like clay.
velvet couches and pitbulls named after lattes and grey and orange streaks across linoleum and charcuterie and christmas and young adulthood and green album covers and vinyls from etsy.
you wrote me a book of poems and didn't cook with beans. i made three cups of shitty coffee in the morning because you drink two sometimes and i stomach one, usually, just to breathe in 14 dollar cologne from marshall's.
i become and you become and we became.
and every time i drive past a duplex i think, this is how we exist now, isn't it? two parts of the same home, back to back. without one side i'd be exposed to the elements.
thank you for protecting me from the rain but not from that defective shower.