Is This Home?

How many people have made me fall apart on this bed?

You could be the only one to never do it;

you could be the last one to ever do it.

I can still feel you on my skin, the palm of my hands,

the kiss on my cheek, the wrists you never touched.

And if I feel you everywhere, won’t it rip me apart?

There are no pieces of you scattered in this room

but when I look out of the window at night

it is your face I see reflected back in the dark,

and no, I can’t say the words down the phone

but there’s echoes of you in every inch of this town

and in everything I do;

the divots in my chest that can be filled with only your face;

the house at the end of the street filled with memories that are not my own;

and in the daylight my love fades away until you are just a man again.

I took the train home for the first time since I left

and there was a girl standing behind her father,

and kids sitting on the platform floor giving a hi-five,

the windows with families playing and laughing,

and someone with the same hair as you,

eighty miles so full of lives, of strangers, of homes,

and I saw the clouds reflected in the water

which rippled under the light breeze

and I thought to myself - is this home?

Is home where I came from, or is it where I made it,

where I choose it to be?

The end of the journey or where it began -

and did I begin when I was born, at my first breath,

when I can remember the spring of childhood,

when I left and sowed the seeds alone for the first time?

Did I begin at the beginning or at the end?

If home could be in the arms of a lover

would I choose it to be?