I met you in the summer and it was heatstroke. I swear I started sweating. My mouth tasted salty the whole night and you never noticed. While we kissed, it was like that red wrapped candy my grandma always kept in a bowl on the table. When I couldnât find the words to precisely describe it, the taste stayed with me. You were hard, but then I bit into you and felt the globs of goo sloshing around, ready to ooze, as if to say: I was waiting for someone to do that. When it was fall, I thought I felt myself too. We were still warm. 103 degree fever, and I was dehydrated. Night after night, I slept under three blankets of insecurities, prepared for the cold front to blow east, but it never did. When the leaves started to decay, it became a fire hazard. I set anything I could find alight. I think I just I wanted to belong somewhere, to witness that all-too-familiar burning sensation destroy another effigy. In the winter we went cold. Like actual rigor mortis. Sometime between the first and last snowfall, we were stuck in an endless loop of January. The next month was the freezing opposite of a candy heart haiku. It took me way too long to realize that flowers canât grow in subzero temperatures. Itâs like, in an ironic effort to be transparent, I neglected to notice the ones inside me were dying. I eventually came to, but by then it was almost too late. After that day, I never tried to bite into you again. The 20 years I spent smiling up at the sun came to an impasse in that one instant. I should have known because my front tooth chipped the first night you said you loved me. You swallowed it. I wish that was a metaphor. It would make it easier to write about. Itâs too bad that I used up all the good ones trying to romanticize what we had. Even worse because thatâs exactly what I was doing the whole time we were together.
fuck. we were almost as played out as using the seasons to describe love.Â