Castles In The Sky

I always wondered what it would be like, playing house with the person you love.

Our imagination works to create a fairytale like the ones we grew up reading.

My mind painted a picture of white duvets and breakfasts in bed, where we talk about the lives we’d lead if we were just a bit younger and just a bit more naive. The winding road trips and the cartons of blueberries and your ‘60s mixtape. Finding old lottery tickets, ghost stories, your hand in mine, Sundays forever.

The white picket fence, replaced with a castle in the sky.

Don’t you feel like the walls are caving in? you ask me one night. You’re sitting on the couch in a dress I’ve never seen. People say to hang art on the walls. To give the illusion of space.

You have a faraway look in your eye, but I ignore what I see and listen to your words instead.

We drive to your parents to pick up the paintings. Four paintings of a rose.

Her favorites, your dad says as he packs them in the back of my truck.

I hang the roses. I see a garden, but you see the spaces in between.

We felt everything after midnight.

The piles of dishes, the unmade bed. The stack of papers on the desk, with your scribbled words that read: all we’ve ever wanted is everything.

The mess inside my head and the truth inside of yours.

So I ask what you want, and you tell me you want your heaven and you want your dreams.

I write to you to say that I’ll be the first to hang your pictures on gallery walls, to play the songs you write, to read your old stories and watch the scenes you star in.

I pick up the phone and stare at the ceiling.

The piles of dishes are gone. The bed is made. The stack of papers left with you, all but one that I keep in a drawer.

Stars dance next to me on the bed where you used to lie. You tell me the stars are dancing next to you, too.

I thought our home was those four walls, but our home is the sky.