LGBTQ+ Poem: Everything in Between, by Alexis Frueh

I
I keep wandering,
Somewhere between awake and asleep
Not sure whether I’m haunted
By ghosts or by dreams.

I keep waiting
For the feelings to fade,
To move past the memories,
To stop daring to dream,
To fathom a future without you in it.

II
You wanted to meet me
In that in between place
Where our differences don’t matter–
Our definitions,
Our perspectives,
Our perceptions,
Our realities;
Where the dark doubts don’t doom
All our hopes to shoulds and should-nots.

The place where we can be–
Always together.

Where I get to kiss you each night
And bid you good morning.
Where I get to be the nook you snuggle into
To get away from the world.
Where I get to be the reason your smile
Reaches up to your eyes.
Where I get to hear all your heart has to tell me,
Followed by “I love you.”
Where I get to prove my love again and again.
Where I get to hold you close and never let go.

Where my dreams come true
Because I’m holding you.

III
From morning to night
I always come back
To this place in my mind
Where memories are all I can find.

Guided by my heart
Through time and through space
Through snippets of stories
And the moments that mattered–

An off-handed invite
For a last-second flight
To flirt with fate,
To meet your people,
To camp with wild horses,
To tease you mercilessly–
In the kayak,
In the car,
In the tent,
In the shower stall next to yours.
To the moment I asked,
Can I kiss you?

From taking your parents’ daughter away–
An 18-hour road trip,
With a paw-tistic puppy
And both of us pms-ing
To meet my family on Thanksgiving
Thankful we’d survived.

To learning the joys of cohabitating
And all of the realizations it reveals:
Melding laundry is a new level of intimacy.
There is a wrong way to fold towels.
Some people actually like dusting.
Dishwasher Tetris is an art form.

IV
The person you fell in love with,
Isn’t always the same person who moves in.

That among the books and baggage,
You also have to unpack
The expectations
The insecurities
The past
And the present

V
Yet those times are gone–
With the chance to make changes
When they might have mattered.
So I picked up the pieces
Of every mirror I’d shattered
And began to reflect
On the self that I saw:

My flaws, the furious fissures–
Fault lines that would yawn
And swallow me whole
Were actually just cracks
That allow me to contract
And e x p a n d
To breathe in again
And again…

My pock-marked personas,
That left me vulnerable
Feeling pitted and exposed.
Were in fact, a chain of chinks
That brought light
To a whole new perspective,
Of shimmer and sheen.

Your fingertips would
Find a brand-new body
One with more scars,
But more healing

One with new chapters
One that now lays open
One that knows
Where it wants to be:

Forever free
From your memory.