i will never love you because you don't smell anything like the Ukraine and because i love a boy who watched the sunset over Kuwait and i love a boy who held his mother's dying hands, asked me to hold them too.  i love a boy and he is not you;

one with i-don't-know-what color hair but definitely-blue eyes, unless you count Texas, who i will always love but will never hold to my tongue or breast or spine again, and of course his eyes were darker than alone and maybe that's where i am because it's hard not to be alone when you love so many people.

and that's another thing because it's not just them.  i love Alaska, i love her green eyes and the way she talks to me in dreams and i love Reese, how she bumbles and while i'm making a list, i love my mother.  i love the way she held my fevered head and the way she danced at my sister's wedding (i love my sister too) and of course my baby brother with his busted lip and how he's taller than me now, like they always said he'd be some day and, i think you understand what i'm trying to say here.

and okay, so i lied.  i love you, too.  the way you are alive and breathing and human, the way you tilt your head when you laugh or maybe the way you sleep sprawled across the bed.  i don't even know if that's how you sleep but i picture you that way now, and i love that picture and i love you too and, i don't know why, but that makes me feel so alone.