She fell out of love on Christmas Eve.

She doesn't dream often, doesn't
sleep enough to miss it. She
is always on earth, throat sore with smoke she's
not quite sure if she wants,
seeing the world in purple and blue,
in strokes of seafoam as the sun rises.

She finds him like cold embers in the middle of winter,
burnt orange.
He tells her he lives in a dream that is too often a nightmare,
says one day he will get the courage
to wake up and do it for real.
She lays his dream on her tongue,
lets it melt,
wonders if it means she is too good to have been real
or not real enough to be worth keeping.

Six months later she tangles
in his brown-red forest feeling,
wondering how they traded seasons,
and when he tells her he'd rather go to sleep,
live in the dreams where he is happy,
she spends too long trying to think of how to argue,
to tell him he needs to stay with her,
when all she can really say is,
I wish I knew the feeling.

She tries to think of them as men, tries
to remember that they're all grown up,
all captains of their own ships these days, but that
means she has to think of herself as a woman and
she feels too much like a lost little girl
chasing the balloons she doesn't remember letting go.

She uses all her best words on them,
one at a time, wonders
if they realize that all her best poetry is sent to them
in the middle of the night
to minds too numb to feel it.
They drink too much to remember conversations she's a part of,
turn her into ocean dreams they say they never had.
She doesn't have the luxury.
She puts their forgotten promises in glass bottles
and wishes real life had commercial breaks.

She always wants to ask them what it means
if dreams are better than the here-and-now
and she has none—if she chose that other life
trapped behind eyelids and midnight thoughts,
would she even exist? Or would she disappear,
fading from their minds
as they woke up and she
finally
fell asleep?