LUCY: Hey!

LUCY’S FRIEND: Hey! You ready? What if he comes?

LUCY: Doesn’t matter.

LUCY’S FRIEND: Alright, let’s do it.

POETRY SLAM ANNOUNCER: Okay, up next we have a performer we haven’t seen in a while. Everyone give a warm welcome to Lucy. I’m glad you’re here.

LUCY: Thank you. Hi, everyone. I’m Lucy, and the title of this piece is… Uh, the title of this piece is…

People make a big deal about eyes, but it was really the wrinkle in his forehead that caught me as he fumbled to write down his number. We fell in love like children running downhill: wind whipping past, parading each other to our friends, to the sky, to the old couples we imagined as our future selves.

When he moved in, I swore he fused with the house. I could hear his sigh in the hum of my ceiling fan, I could taste him in my coffee, and anyone could see him in my poetry.

The grooves in his palm spoke of tragedies. A frayed lifeline spread to the pinky tip. I traced along those calloused patches and kissed the scars on his knuckles.

When you love hard enough, you can embrace those scars. And when you love long enough, you excuse or even ignore almost imperceptible changes in the terrain: when he gripped me a bit tighter, a bit more often. When “How are you?” became “Where were you?”

In college, I learned that in World War I, soldiers rarely wrote about their misery. They were living a new kind of nightmare, so what good were the same old words and metaphors?

Poets died in those trenches. I thought of them as I tiptoed around the landmines that littered our home. When you live in a battlefield, where do you find energy to pick up a pen?

Like a numbed soldier, I lived from moment to moment, and when the moments were sweet (and many were), I savored them because nothing tastes as good as hope.

Because even on the bad days when it seemed an eyelash could set him off, when he threatened to leave the apartment or this world, still each night he would murmur into my ear that these were the natural ups and downs of love.

But there is nothing natural about war.

He was my comrade, sinking into the trenches, grasping at my face, my arm, my collarbone. I wanted to rescue him. If that meant bearing his blows and his slurred insults, I would do it. If I could’ve swallowed his sadness, I would have.

My friends considered me MIA, but I reported for duty every day and would’ve marched into death if she hadn’t made me listen. In that moment, I realized I wasn’t his comrade, but a prisoner of his war. And after two years and seven months, I finally made a break for it.

Some nights I find myself clicking through old memories. I marvel at the smiles and the closeness and realize that these are the images which remain with me most vividly. When time has had its way with me, has softened the edges of my memory, I’m afraid I’ll only remember his charms: the crook of his arm, the way he said “Hey baby.”

I’m afraid I’ll miss these ideas of him.

But then I remember those poets, and how long they lived in those trenches, and the mornings I spent crying into my breakfast. And now when I pick up my pen, it is heavy, but it is firm. I lean into it like a staff as I tread the ground that hardened beneath me the moment I let you go.

The ink smudges my hands like war paint. I am bruised from battle, but I am not a casualty of his war.

I am free. I am free.

I am mine.