I spoke to some friends today, got regaled with tales of lost loves and coincidental meetings. I wallow with my slim friend Winston, he and I sitting reticent in a dirty stairwell with nervous lighting overhead, and wonder what those curly wisps of carcinogenic vapours try to tell me. Year ends always creep up on me like tides at sunset and i guess the feelings don't ebb until long after. I lift up my shirt and that labour of love sits there staring across my chest. It peels like hurt, layers and layers squalling for release. Maybe the tittering needle didn't pierce deep enough, or maybe you're just not a part of me anymore. People ask me why. "Why get a tattoo of her?" they say, and I reply with forced nonchalance. I tell them, "It's a period of my life that happened, I guess I'd like to keep it forever etched across my ribs. But I guess I don't like lying either. Like a freight train into a gleaming fishbowl you left me flailing and gasping in the cool night air at Gotham Penthouse. Maybe I'd like to eulogize that moment but there was nothing good about it. You left me sapped for a few days, your long snaking fingers that I used to savour and your saccharine voice, chords in a broken ballad, my head never again on your satin skirts. I had to be carried out that night by one and a half friends, feeling like I'd been sucker punched. I remember it was as if I were a deer in your vaunting glare, almost ashamed of the spectacle. Cantankerous girl.
I wanted those doe eyes lapping up my soma, again and again I wanted to feel how bodies could intertwine in a sad happy web of desire and heartache. I wanted you, never changing. I wanted your heart, static in those moments, I wanted your svelte fingers across my face, wanted you to bore deep into my inner recesses, wanted you to tease those three words out of me, sweet yet dangerous. I wanted to break the duality of this self imposed platonic desire. I didn't want to wake up and realize I was in the midst of a never ending moratorium. I never wanted this impossible calamity.
That tattoo, forever black and blue. Even through the looking glass you refuse to meet my gaze you mangle me inside, if you were to climb through my innards a la our favourite Lemmiwinks you would find the sweet throbbing core missing. I guess those innumerable days away from you whittled it away like an ice pick on a reluctant glacier.
Maybe at a mutual friend's wedding, maybe at a class reunion, they all say, but if I stood afore you there would be nothing useful to utter, no funny ha-ha story, no biting recount of the past year's events, there would not even be the proverbial 'vast ocean betwixt us', there would just be nothing, no melancholic film soundtrack, no screech of the inimitable gramophone, no mutual indulgence, my hand forever outstretched but denied your uncharitable digits. I would never dare venture across that abyss, it just screams lost time.
Sometimes, I let my mind wander in those hazy dreams like a silly child and his favourite comforter, I let him stray to you and he always returns blank and silent, sapped.
All those hackneyed words for you they need no elucidation.
Everyday I wait for the One who will make me recant them.