from the depths of a cold fall, you were brought to me and from the depths of the city i reached for you. you were the at the apex during those years i lived at night. the nights were too long to remember and passed through us, between us, but in the brightest lights you took me to the shore of the sea. we balanced on trees that the ocean had had its way with then tossed aside, we didn’t see them as a causality and even though we should have. it was only the beginning then.
years later, we drove up island. i had joined them in that bright light, but you remained in those depths. the summer’s sun lit you up, i remembered the love i have for you. its the story i tell, its the mark you’ve left. its the part of you i can call my own.
you left at the beginning of summer in the same way we had met (in the spring that had fallen through my hands just before), not fortuitously, deliberately. and while you were away, our apartment followed the movements of the sun, and the heat wouldn’t allow for sleep. i wrote to tell you how time wasn’t bringing you closer, “today is still today, and tomorrow will still be tomorrow”, but you reassured me of the moon, “I beg to be released to you - it ain’t too long, it ain’t too much, but i miss all of you, anything, all of it. but one day were going to wake up, like we had been dreaming together all night and i’ll be home”.
you came back during a heatwave. you obliged the knight of cups, while i lived violently in the suit of wands. i can’t remember how the summer ended, because the the fall came so loudly, while you tried your best to keep quiet. and my biggest regret is not forgiving you for the change of seasons. we moved in the middle of winter, neon lights lit our bedroom at night and it felt like the sun again, but the resentment against it came on stronger, and fell heavily in a different context; time wasn’t bringing you closer, and i used everything you had given me to chase the coast of california.
i stood above the trees to look on at it, when it was over, it was summer again and i could see the stars (like we had), but you begged me not to tell, “monks in the cloisters not a word from a woman hail mary was born, thought alone does indeed make monsters”.
these aren’t memories of love, because when you saw the damage you’d left (your own sick tattoo, and when you looked on at it your were proud to find that it felt more like a trophy), it wasn’t a tragedy, it was high tide. and when you reach this beginning (thats not really a beginning at all, but an ending) is when you would remember me. my fingers tracing the bones in your back, memorizing the ridges of your spine. mapping the edges of your shoulder blades as if they were the plates of the continents, spreading my hand across the place in-between, my fingers filling the distance that separates us. but with a little more empathy for the sense of touch, you would have felt the pressure of my hand pushing the oceans up over the shores.
without you, the ocean or the sky, i was among sea creatures that told me about the colours that create the dark. they came to me in different forms by the contradiction to be attracted to the light. the deepness of their colours surprised even the wildest ocean storms. i remembered them through metaphors of their darkness and in silence i told them so, even though they would never comprehend. only you, on the surf of the sea could understand what they never would. on the easiest spring day, the salt still in your hair, you understood where i would meet you, in past tense not present.
the nights were deliberately long, and i endured every constellation they offered and still begged for more, but the city lights only gave so many (orion’s belt - the first i had ever seen). heavy with the warmth from all of the animate and inanimate you’s, i dulled the pain of lost words with banality. i no longer marked pages of words, but instead left memories of you in their place. i mourned them silently and longed for their weight, i buried each one as if it has been the ritual all along. the mornings had a softer darkness that can only be described without long phrases of metaphors i had adapted, i made attempts to thrive there by ignoring the loss. the prairie skies painted themselves gently and reminded me how far away the sea had become and how far i had to look.
i tried to relate to them what i knew - blue whales and the reflection of stars on the sea - but it was an impossible correlation to make. the breaking of something is a difficult place to begin.
