beautiful/terrifying

I know the shape of your form sleeping next to me, Know the rise and fall of your chest and the exact temperature of your body under the covers. My sleeping body aches closer to your over the course of a night and I claim no responsibility for its encroaching on your personal space. I know the color of your absence, its gravity and its alchemy.

you, little you little oh-oh-oh of my spine,  quiet ache of curling toes, happy burden.

Watching a porno to see how it ends.

Cars in the street beneath my window: Quick tires on wet pavement, dragging rain water that resists for an instant and then springs to life- Tiny sprays chasing workhorses, Feeble wakes,  Lazy waking in the city, Tea leaves unfurling in a morning mug.

the floor falls out from underneath you, so you guess you were standing a minute ago, after all. it's dark down here. your stomach flips. you taste your dinner again in your mouth, and there is a tingling in your fingertips. it's silent all around you; you wonder if you've lost your hearing. you aren't sure if you're hearing yourself breathing or if you're just feeling it inside your nose. the air is humid, and it smells like a water ride at an amusement park that has gone too long without being cleaned. there is something comforting about the smell, actually. it brings you back to the summer fair that would set up for three days at a time in late may in the town you grew up in. you know you aren't there, though. you can't be. the smell carries something else with it, too. fond childhood memories, sure, but also the monsters that lived under your bed growing up. your breath feels shallow and you worry that you won't be able to catch it. you fill your lungs slowly and deliberately. 

It’s grasping at a spec of confetti underwater, or you try waiting for the words; so then it’s like seizing a downward drifting petal, while the sun shines in your eyes and the tiny delicate thing blends with the sky in the light, but it’s in the light anyways. It evades language, escapes your palms, falls somewhere else.

your feet are on cement, and you realize that it will rain. the air is damp already: heavy and crisp and something like electric. there is a smell to it, too; already new, as if the plants are open to receive the water, and are slowly leaking whatever it is that makes them green, as if they have to spill something to be filled up again. 

you will know us by the prisoners we keep, the trophies we steal; the scars we make sure you see, and the skeletons we keep concealed. These are not our teeth. You will know us by the things we leave behind, maybe the things that weren't worth taking. You will know us by these dead souvenirs, these ephemeral bits that will live on the tips of your tongues, long after our lips have lost the words that named them. They will outlive you, too.  

it is a long, blue horizon that i am looking at and i know the water must meet the sky somewhere, know there are two others meeting at some distance but from here it is just mist, meeting mist, meeting darker mist, mist forming waves as it comes closer, waves folding and breaking and hiding shadows and suddenly a burst of white wings seagulls, old friends. i carry no albatross around my neck, so then: white wings gliding, riding a jet stream, effortless, and we are working so hard to just keep up. mist meeting mist meeting darker mist, meeting waves, and then a lighthouse: beacon, flashing light,  but that is just electricity. 

There are some stories that become easier in their retelling: the development of your smoking habit, why you went vegetarian and then back again, why you broke up with that boyfriend and how you still find yourself living with him, that time you tried pot brownies and why you won't try them again. There are ways to tell these stories which make them universal, or at least banal, and you discover and perfect these angles each time, until you’ve taken these stories to bed with you and found them comfortable and warm beneath the covers. Then there are the other stories, which take something with them each time they’re retold, which don’t get easier, because there is no angle from which you can shine a light that will make them appear familiar or safe. These are the scar stories, the dad stories, and the stories that came before the breakup stories. For now, at least, they will always have teeth, and they’ll stay under your bed, because it takes time to build up the kind of skin that is okay with being shed for a story. 

a postcard from a past lover, keeping page in a book that was exciting, once. still beautiful. second shelf: eye level. a postcard from a past lover, keeping page. stored on the second shelf eye level. thrilling, once.  still beautiful.

one, two, off like a bandaid, it's better this way, anyways. forget that i ever wanted you anyway. any way. move on this way, in and out of days, keep going this way. 

Call this a human body and I will call it a journey, because that is the word we’ve learned to pin to the unfathomable, (as if we could pin it, hold it in one place to conceive of it as whole.) If this is a journey, it is a wayward one. Each step, each stitch taking me further from where I ever wanted to be. Whole, supple, tangible and present. Instead: fragile, immovable, meant to be seen but not too closely, and never touched. Too many things to explain, and never the right words.

that day we visited the parliament buildings, you said that seagulls were really just overgrown pigeons; we watched the crows picnic in the grass and called that beautiful. but today, this seagull who has just touched down beside me  steps delicately so as not to startle me.  his webbed feet spread under his featherweight as he tiptoes across this concrete, towards a discarded apple core. surely, he is something more.