I lit those smoke signals for you first, but maybe we were both pulling at the same string,
plucking our way through a language of love knots and forget-me-not flowers.
When they wilt, don’t take it as a sign of sadness, take it as a sign for something new.
It is just the Earth preparing for change; a language no one wants to speak
yet it is spoken every day.

Like now, when we both want to say something but neither of us knows how to say it.
In the meantime, I’ll be sitting in the house decorated with
peeling paint chips like summer finger nails, the house that is missing
a few floor boards. I’ll be waiting for you to mend them with the tools of your rib cage.

Until then, everything we have is only on pause; a bear in hibernation, an empty car
on the highway shoulder, or the bookmarked page of a dust-covered story.
Even if time has remolded the world during our slumber,
and the piano has grown out of tune,
the notes of our song are still the same.

I’ll leave a dashed line for you to follow
when it is time to find me again.