I Looked For You In Vain

I searched for you in the sunrise hours, where the city yawned itself awake under unfinished artwork and railroaded tracks. I raked the valleys of my memory, stepped over the skeletons of us, scattered like dry bones, starved from lack. Each bone held marrow of you—your laugh caught in the palm of your hand, your betrayal slipping between streetlights but never without your shadow self. 

I looked for you in the bottles where we once pelted down, where our egos collided the small space between us like two invisible vans at the crossroads. In the piles of our ruins, I retraced the route, drawing lines that led only to clouds that never held rain, where sobriety held court. I knocked on the doors of so many vices, found them abandoned, walls thick with dust and the phantoms of our pillow talk.

I sought you in the eyes of other queer women, a lover chasing shadows, hoping we'd see eye-to-eye. But their eyes were mirrors of my desperation, blank except for the reflection of need. 

I looked for you in the sky, between the moon and stars, in the blackness of a night that never brought rain, never brought you back to our thirsty home.