may 23rd 2024

february last year: “admittedly i still think about kissing you before i go to sleep. i imagine you come to visit me in maryland. i take you to the park behind my elementary school just before sunset. you stay in my sister’s room adjacent to mine, and when my parents are asleep you tiptoe in. we don’t have sex. i crack open the window to hear the cicadas. is that the future you said you could see? maybe ours are different. i know it isn’t real. i know it isn’t fair for me to tell you. i’m sorry. i just want you to believe me.”

you said i was heavy, i pressed you into a grave underground, but you were there over the elevator threshold, stumbling drunk, and you said, don’t go, but i couldn’t stay, and my fingers found the button down, but your fingers found your other hand, her wedding band, and how long had you been waiting, or had you waited at all? you’re on your knee, please don’t go, your favorite fish, but i can’t stay, and the metal shuts between us, and i’m falling down, but i know where you are. i could never live with myself for loving you. 

february this year: on my birthday i bought you a pack of cigarettes, which i said i’d never do. you wanted spirits, blue, and i was nervous to get the wrong blue but i didn’t. i met you outside of e-market by the fence around the cafe seats. you had to leave for therapy. you were afraid she’d smell them on you, but you didn’t say that. you were proud of me for deviance. absorbed and becoming. you touched my arm on purpose. 

maybe i don’t feel anything at all, but i swear that once i did. i’m not allowed to, see, i have to be good, to suffocate the voice that i hear when i’m high and i remember you. i hated myself for what i wanted and resented you for wanting it freely, envied how your body moved before your mind. hand that seeks me in the back row, you did what you could, never when it was right to, but you risked much for loving me. you’re so eager to throw it all away. you hate what you have, what you don’t have, and that you’ll never be satisfied by love, so you burn one for another to drug yourself to sleep. at least you are honest. lust and the shame that follows exist inside my mind for no one else to see, so i circle myself from the sky, capturing details to punish myself over. it’s a guarantee that someone is listening—and if i write then letters know.

i know how it happened, so i know i did just what i knew how to do. you settled your forehead on the door—i said, what’s wrong, but we knew, too stubborn to admit our knowing to resign that subtle power. you said, sorry, it’s nothing. i had you shake my hand and promise your trust. i had you look at my eyes, each of us gutted by the thought. you said, i see myself in you, and i believe that. i can’t tell you that i’m sorry anymore. 

i reel like spilled tape from a dust-caked projector. load it up, rewind, retry. the sound is delayed, the image decentered, particulars lost to kodak. your face obscures in shadow, and i won’t see it again outside of archived scans. you said you haven’t wanted this for a long time. i must’ve shot the whole thing on the wrong setting. time’s a fickle bitch.