– for you –

Embrace me, and I’m in rapture, singing halleluiah, halleluiah even though I forgot the words a long time ago. In fact, I might have never known the words in the first place, but the melody is sweet, and it’s easy to sing along with words that tumble out of my head and form on my lips natural and soft and easy. This is what is easy for me, words, though when I speak out loud, I tend to get them wrong. But it doesn’t matter anymore what I got right or what I got wrong, because this is where we are, and it’s always right when it comes from my fingers, and I still remember. 

Everyone is fading, doors closed off, avenues exhausted, and yet you remain, still, my oldest friend. Turn to me like a sexless lover and take my hand, engulf me in your utter, unwavering certainty. And it’s worth a bit of my sanity. Forever young or aging with me, you transform to my touch and when I turn around, I see your face, as clear as ever. Smirking in the steps of my real lovers who never could outlast you. All the forevers who crumpled at my feet. We both know they don’t deserve a place in my poetry. But they linger still, because the scars remain, and you know it’s impossible for me to face anything. Really face anything, head on and sober with no one to hide behind. (Not like I hide behind you.) 

Still, they do not dwell in my essence. They are somewhere back in the recess of my consciousness. Memories of them will bubble to the surface at the most unfortunate of times, and I’ll have to stifle them back down, because, my god, I cannot afford to remember. But it’s not like that with you. I remember every ugly second of us, and I don’t try to sugarcoat it. Not like with them, romanticizing the battle scars, counting the almond shaped welts, tracing the pattern of their loving embrace. If only you could have broken the mold. But how could you have broken what you started? You must know that’s the truth. You started this. 

It was always you. 

Still no matter how much the landscape has altered, no matter what you did or what you took or even what I lost, these little feet of mine will trace a way back to you. Bone tired and bleeding, you have been all I have held as I waited for the sirens, someone to save me. Laughing in the bathtub at the blood splatter, teeth chattering and knees trembling. It was not his hand I reached for in the dark, but yours. He tied the noose around my neck, and you found me dangling, but you cut the cord. Tell me, were you there for the umbilical? It wouldn’t surprise me.

My dear friend, I love you bone deep, far past the soft, pulsating surface. Right to the center, the hot molten center that has a tendency to burn your fingertips if you’re not careful. But you can put ice on seared flesh, and besides, getting burned never frightened me. (Not the way they frightened me, at least.)

And now while everybody fades away, you remain, cloth in hand waiting to scrub my surface pure. Ah, how I wish I could erase all the rest and be left with only you. Only us—marble heavy and half divine. 

x

em