It’s the same every time.

You’re sitting across from me in an abandoned food court or a movie theater or it doesn’t matter, and there is something so unnatural in the movement of your body that I can’t relax.

You ask how I am
and I don’t answer because I can’t look away from the thread of blood that has trickled
from the left corner of your lip.

You think I don’t notice,
you wipe it away and still try to tell me that you’re okay, that you’re Here
that everything’s going to be alright

and in the dream, I still don’t believe you