learning the language of "we"

i knew a girl who wrote words everywhere.
they were on her body and her car,
the inner lip of her bathtub,
and i'm sure, if you looked,
you could see them coagulated in her blood.
she used them to remember that she was alive
and when she hurt herself, used them as salve.
this girl scribbled them madly in old notebooks
and convinced herself that they belonged to her.

she convinced me, too.

i had once used words as ships.
they carried what i could not across oceans of conflict
and unease.
they used to soften hard eyes
and caused a few gentle boys to fall in love.
when i felt helpless
i'd craft a small ship
a few lines, no more,
and pushed them towards a drowning mind.

the girl meant no harm when she convinced me
that words could be owned.
like slaves, they were whipped and shackled
to singular thoughts,
a singular mind.
i scooped a handful of them into my mouth
and closed my lips;
i could not lose them.

every word that i spoke began to feel like hers.
the more i tried to tell the more lost in her i became.
my own words stepped back like the water body to an oil coat.
it was all black and slick,
a facade that masked nothing.
i reused and recycled the same thoughts and anxieties
different only in color or font.

i am her.
i am her.
i am her.

you slash and you delete but you cannot disregard the root.

seven months of poems were all about her.
poems of crippling sadness
and agoraphobic episodes,
poems describing drunken secrets
and regrettable intimacy,
the slivers of the pinkest, weakest parts of me
were all her, her, her.

i couldn't train my tongue to unlearn her language
and i couldn't forget how to write
so i learned hopelandic.