The Promise that You Made

One night, after we finished,
and we lay entwined the way I love,
he told me, “No matter what happens,
no matter what we do,
someday the world will end.”
I think he says these things
to startle me,
so then I’ll feel his body against mine
like it’s his promise to me.

What promise, I don’t know.
I think if I asked,
he would tell me, “That I’m here,
this is now,
and it may be the last here,
the last now,
that you and I, or you or I,
will ever have.”

I think he would mean it
in a good way.

But these promises fill me up,
they build inside me
the way thunderheads bloom in silence
on a humid summer day.

And I can smell it, that copper in the air
that surrounds a storm, that rises
off the asphalt as a mist into the sky.
That smell
is all around me, in my sheets,
in my paychecks, in my car
and in his shirts.

This is not
the thing I dreamed of.

It’s as if with every promise he breaks
my heart
because I know no matter what happens,
no matter what we do,
someday I’ll have to break his too.

I think he says all these things
to startle me,
but I don’t think he realizes
just how they do.