You are the picture frame I got for my fourteenth birthday

That still, to this day hangs empty on my wall.

In your hands you hold the first page of a book

That I desperately want to read, but can’t

because this is about as unrequited as love can get.

You are my digital clock that keeps getting unplugged

and reset back to twelve midnight.

The kind that to find the right time again you have to keep pressing those buttons

and once you reach the number you were looking for It’s already a minute off.

In your eyes you hold an infinite mystery

full of things that I probably made up

and places that I will probably never see.

You are a seashell lying in the sand:

You aren’t always there, but god knows I search the crowd for you wherever I go.

You are the lyrics to my favorite song, scratched into my wooden brain with rusty thumbtacks

that I read through a one-way mirror,

A mirror that I would like to crack so that we can stand together just once

But I’m afraid that if I do it will shatter into millions of tiny pieces

That I will use to scratch out the lyrics that the thumbtacks etched into my mind.