#sapphosquad

crimes of nostalgia

i write to my past to offer her a mercy that i won’t spare myself. i give her nostalgia and call it love, half-mourning for the person i was while i’m watched by my future with eyes that forgive these hands, too. this promise that i will only give to memory. you were enough. tell me how many times i have to be saved before it lasts.

somewhere in me there’s a will to stay. i daydream about tendon-pulls and finding the spaces between ligament and bone. listen—i didn’t mean it gentle anyway. listen—i’m aware of the blood, i hear my body too clearly, too visibly, this sound that is the end of the world, listen—i’d trade our sight for weightlessness. i ask her to play this game, the same one we always do, make it just dangerous enough to be worthwhile. fingers closing veins, air-flutter throat and warm-high- hopeless light in her eyes. please just let one thing matter. please let me make anything better. listen,

there’s a place that’s bluer than the sky & you think you’ve found it & you’re afraid you’ll lose it. you climbed for so long only to learn that the thing about a peak is there’s nothing left after. a bird can only fly so high before it can’t breathe anymore. yes, this is a love you’d bleed for, but

where else can you go from here but down? you can feel your feathers turning ice-heavy already, gravity waiting to reclaim you, time running down on a clock. nothing left for your fists to shatter but this fleeting happiness. it was never air beneath your wings, it’s glass, a fracture, and you’ve always been so good at breaking things—

you say lonely and you mean this is what was supposed to happen all along, you mean tell me how to stop caring so much. where to pin the fear except against my own throat, sparrow to window, tell me it doesn’t hurt this time, the sudden shattering where i expected sky. the ending is what won’t go away. tell me you know what i mean.

i. somewhere, one of us is asking for softness. there’s a city of stone and a city by the sea and i’ve learned losing in both of them, but there’s a new kind of unreturning clasped in my hands now. you’re the same kind of drowning as me, except you’re happy sometimes, aren’t you? there’s warmth. there are people who love you, not for blood but feathers, gentle and blanketing as petals.

ii. the sun is there even when you aren’t. i’d be lying if i said i never wanted to see you again. i tell you i can’t help the way i flicker back to life when you recognize me. just a pair of shadow-wings finding a way in the dark by the echoes.

iii. it isn’t gentle, the way you’ve learned to flip coins, catching fate in the way they shine as they fall. i taught you a language of grave dirt under tongues and lightning-strikes; you speak it well. when i die again, plant flowers where my bones lie so you know it’s true this time.

iv. the sun is there even when you aren’t. it isn’t always a comfort.

v. i want to tell you i don’t think we’d know what to do with softness if we ever found it, but that’s an accusation only my own mirror will ever speak. on the other side of the cold glass, a flock of magpies breaks the sky open, and the light that shines through blinds me. i wasn’t made for this sunlight.