By FreeQuency. Photo by Mariam Armisen

I.

my girlfriend calls me little sky. she sees my smile a rising sun, my depression a dark cloud always looming over my horizons, my fear a fog that creeps in and blinds me before I realize
how thick it has become.

she doesn’t know how much it means to be seen as the whole sky when my entire life others have only loved me as the sun. how they have come to me for warmth but shied away from the shiver of my sadness, how they have loved me when the summer breeze is in my laugh but have sheltered against my heart’s howling winds.

I’ve spent so much time shining for them, I’ve forgotten I should be loved even as a storm, making oceans of my sadness, when I am the darkest of nights forgetting that I have always
held the North Star.

II.

My ex girlfriend used to call me little sky. I started to believe her.

but when you start to see yourself as the sky, it is hard to come back down to Earth without feeling like a crashing comet, an armless Atlas who can’t carry the weight of being the sky, cannot even lift her head to see the beauty of all she holds

III.

my ex girlfriend still sometimes calls me little sky.
it’s harder to hear her now through the hurricane of hurt I long ago learned to see as daily forecast.

Sometimes, when we speak, I am in the eye of my storms, and in those moments, I am reminded that she too has always been sky. that we are both just weather. each emotion another page in the
almanac of this thing we call life.

I wonder if her gray skies make her forget they also had a radiant sun like they do for me.

I want to remind her, but it has been so long since I’ve felt the warmth from my own rays.

so long since I felt like a sky that could hold a sun, or a sky at all.