The problem with you Eren is that you never did learn how to be forgettable.
From the moment you walked (crashed) into my side in a crowded corner of my local subway stop. You looked at me past a fistful of my coatsleeve wrinkled in your hand and said “sorry” half a dozen times all the way down the block to the coffee shop.
I remember approximately none of the small talk we shared over the milk and sugar and half-burnt bagels but what I do remember are your lips curling up with the coffee steam as you scribbled me your number on a napkin.
You had a habit of dropping by just as I was dropping off and leaving rainstains all over the fucking carpet. Three nights and two days later they’d be long dry and you’d be long gone and your shirt would be slung over the couch, your coaster-less cup on the coffee table, your toothbrush jostling with mine in the cup beside the sink.
(your note beside my pillow saying sorry for coming so late and staying so long and leaving so early but never, ever sorry for the mess)
The problem is that you were pretty happy to go the extra fucking mile just as long as you were told to stay in place. Six months of pillow-talk negotiations, rules and boundaries bandied over stilted whisper-kisses. Words like “itch” and “scratch” and “casual”, careful and cool, intimate as the dig of your elbow at my side five minutes into the post-coital cuddling we never did. Until we did.
Until you raised your sorry arm in a lazy arc above my head and dropped it, like a sentence, across my waist and I fell asleep to your lips on my collarbone and your fingers at my hip.
(and your heartbeat in my blood)
That night and a thousand nights before that, I closed my eyes and I felt fire, I saw dust, I tasted blood. You were there and I saw green and then you were gone. Then I opened my eyes and there you were, half awake and half smiling, and all I saw was green, all the time everywhere, your thousand year-old party trick.
The problem with you Eren is that you never were very good at keeping still.
I’ve got your note in my hand, your tinny voicemail in my ear, your fucking mess in every corner of this room
(The burning world at my back, your body at my feet, your blood in my hands again)
In the end, the phone beeps once. And all I can say is “I’m not as strong as you remember.”
