Sunset Boulevard. Not a location, but a state of mind. All the places I loved you, and lost you, and held you. All the milestones and way-markers a midst the tattered remains of regal suburbia. {So asphyxiating. God, I can't breathe.}. I feel so intensely, it lights a fire beneath my soles, and tears at the lining of my stomach. It's not mine to control. When I cry, it comes with the force of shattering glass, and pushes new worlds of opportunity into existence. The Renaissance. Recreating, removing, and reforming.

In love,

I found myself shrinking out of habit.

Trying to be something.

Trying to be more, feel less.

And the entire time,

A weight began to form inside my sternum.

Unconsciously, I knew that changing myself,

Molding myself into a guise of all your loves

And greatest desires,

It would kill me.

This is not how you love.

You loved me out to be a secret.

I didn't know better.

Draping me in friendship,

Until we're alone,

And you'd rip the curtains apart

And finally hold me closely.

That was our love.

It's so constricting

To hide behind those walls for you.

And I think that,

That is why you never stop

Pouring out of my fingertips.

Everything of you I have,

It doesn't exist to anyone but me.

Because everyone is so unaware

Of the loving we had.

This is an end to secrecy.

An end to hiding.

An end to letting you

Still take up so much of my space.

This is me,

Driving down Sunset Blvd. one last time.

Looking at the homes we built together.

Picking the flowers I planted for you,

Taking them with me on the road.

Taking back my beauty.

Looking through the windows,

Preserving moments I didn't want to forget.

Moments that no one will ever know of.

I pick sticks out of the grass

And start a bonfire

In the middle of the oil-stained pavement.

Burning what I have left of you.

Burning myself to be freed of you.

An exorcism.

Sunset Blvd.,

Unreasonably loved.

Unconscionably remembered.

You bear no resemblance to the man I loved.

He's gone now.

From what I've heard,

He lives on Sunset Blvd.,

And I haven't seen him since