Drowning in Euphoria

“do you ever think of strangling me while i am asleep?”

he doesn’t.

but sometimes he watches my consciousness impersonate the softness of a preserved corpse and remembers the november sunset crowning : stillborn. i am the umbilical yarn winded around the last beautiful face he ever knew, the first gemini twin to dislodge itself from his corner of the constellations.

even our bodies wanted to write words and seem chronological but the only timeline we could build was eight p.m. kisses in a public bathroom and thirteen minutes of excruciating pain two years later in some small town in the south. he yawns and i smile because he is satisfied in being perfectly, horribly unsatisfied. he probably loves me.

yes, he does.

addressed to: ‘dearest’

you were a child’s forehead scar
and I was only ever a bad motel room habit
white like porcelain china plates.
we are still just an eventual existence -
shifting in and out of the same consciousness,
(but I cannot forget the curse of your sleeping face.)

you are not the moon still in her infancy, stagnant and curled like a fetus. but you are the darkness she inherited, the definitions her blood will carry vein to vein, artery to bone, universe to useless. i often try to remind myself that last year it was summer. it was summer and the arches of your stature were not distorted like skyscrapers standing in a rainstorm. i remember the height of your temperature when my body was your fever.  lover, lover, lover - but you are not my lover. not anymore.

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The gruesome softness in your voice, I can hear it again. I still see the vacancy between your words written on lined paper, stamped, received two weeks late. There is a sea, there is snow, there is soil, there is someone eight hundred miles away who said, “I am in love with you”, and sometimes I wonder if he meant it.

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B - the love of my life.
J - the other love of my life.

you’re barely stirring awake and i am biting my lip again. how do we stop ourselves from meeting each other in this purgatory?

It was cold. It was cold and the sea was pitch black, blacker than the unconscious breath an existence takes under damp eyelids, curled palms, white memory, blush red hips unexposed by soft blankets. My fingers tried to be persuasive but you are not a noose, you are not the floor beneath my cracked ribs, you are not a color. You were always a postage stamp, checkered timeline, washed voice, summer freshness, blank stare, nothing, no one, smoke. I wanted to lose you to a girl’s bad dream in Kansas. I never wanted to lose you at all. I wanted to unbind you out of novels and snowy shoulders. Neither of us would remember, neither of us would remember what it felt like to feel each other’s unused space, in the bedroom, in the head. You forgot and so did I.

I think, I wish.

it was there again. the snow. underneath the heights of our veins and the stall in each breath you take when morning passes farther away from that bliss no one ever leaves bed with. in the color of your hands, in the lack of color of your hands, i remember how drunk you were one night, one year ago. i remember the sloppiness of the stars, the hours that disappeared into unconscious states. i could almost call it existence because there is nothing else that matches the word. nothing.

wolf,

we were never star crossed.

when i was with you and without you, i did not feel time or gravity or space. i didn’t hear the rain as much as i just knew its existence. i didn’t envy the moon or its authority. i didn’t remember the sea for its blues and greens and greys but for the parts of it that i didn’t get to see. and you were as stale as you were fresh. you were as dead as you were alive. our motion was slower than the carousel we became, maybe that is what made us impossible. because the universe moved so much faster. we were never star crossed.

just dimensionless.

grizzly bear,

i’ll be your four a.m. disease and promise to never forget
your lean-down-and-kiss-me height.

someday you will detox the poison out of your bones
the off white cream shoulders out of your memory
the silence out of undiagnosed rainstorms

i will try not to fight our fire with matches or gasoline
but the summer never asks for a lover’s consent,
and i am just now realizing that your eyes are very much like almonds.

i am a wreck, i am an absolute wreck
who wants to hear your voice at unusual hours of the night,
to wash away the breath of that werewolf heading towards the sea,
the black, black sea and all of it’s charred remains.

wait for me on the other side of the universe
twist the supernovas around your fingers like you always do,
just like you always do - i’ll be here watching the lightning
that you make because someone has to listen for the thunder.

the thunder.

i’ll never ask, not again
and the shortness of your breath
is a temporary distance away from those shallow roads,
those shallow nights in blind love with lonesome
or the fragility our bodies spoke below thirty two degrees
you will start your voyage at my shoulders,
just to end up more than half-way around the widowed moon,
under the alienation of an always asleep sky
but i still wonder if we are perfectly symmetrical strangers
hibernating in the lukewarm summer morning of shared bedsheets
and the mourning, the mourning i still have for you
i cannot replace your vocal chords with ceiling fan hums,
there is too much existence between the four corners of space
cradling this blackened atmosphere draped across our blistered limbs
dense, we are dense and made out of thousands of emptied constellations -

you told me so.

to the boy with the two middle names,

sometimes i wonder how long it will take for us to get from the shore to the sea. i told you we would never be the ocean, we would never be as vast as the underwater universe and maybe never as clear as the november skies born inside of your arms. you are the receding coastline, darling, the washed away miles upon miles i can almost feel when i lose myself enough.

do you measure the distance between our stars? i don’t. but i measure the length of your fingers and the number of bumps on your spine and the inches of cold space in your bedroom on quiet sunday nights. the mornings of absence can be the worst, because waking up outside the dimension of our sunrise is a loneliness i won’t forget even when there is winter again and you are long gone.

yours,
the girl who remembers everything

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