The day before you left us, I told him: “I think I saw the future last night” I told him I dreamed the room was blue I dreamed the room was blue, and the couch was too small, and there was a nail polish stain on the arm of his chair I dreamed there was starlight in the air I dreamed you were laughing like a child, and your eyes were the best kind of wild, and the tv light made you look like a solar flare, flashing off your teeth and catching in your hair, and we were both as lost in you as we always are, and it felt like being caught in the gravity of binary stars When I woke, I told him: “I have never wanted anything more” And when you left that night, he rendered what i said, and he tucked the hurt under his tongue like pills he couldn’t bear to swallow, and he spent the next month spitting it back at me whenever it started to choke him, and I spent the next month pretending I could survive the acid burns he was leaving me with, and you- You spent the next goddamn month talking to him like you couldn’t see what you’d done. The problem is, he always had crumbling pipe dreams clenched in one brass knuckled fist, kept it tucked safe in his pocket, away from your eyes like his ugliest habits, masked under a layer of denim and devil-may-care what you think but fuck everyone else- The problem is that I showed up. The problem is that I showed up, and you were caught in my orbit, comet instead of asteroid, and he wanted to hate me for having you, and he wanted to hate me for existing, he wanted to hate you for putting him last, and he wanted me, and later he wanted to hate you for that, too, the problem is the way he touched us in that arcade booth, the problem is a ten color pen and your lips on my neck and his hands on your hands on my chest- The problem is, we got careless. And now his lungs are collapsing alongside the ground he’s chasing to try to stay in your orbit, and I don’t know how much longer I can play ventilator. You’ve made speechless poets of us both, got us choking on our words and our hurt and each others tongues, like kissing hard enough can re-balance the galaxy without the fucking sun, like if we pretend we can’t taste the blood on our lips maybe it will never have been there, like we’re trying to survive on recycled air- Look. You’re gone and we’re crashing and I don’t tell him about the futures I dream anymore because every night, I am dropping our hearts from the top of a ferris wheel, they are shattering on impact, he is bleeding, he is looking at me with moonless eyes, he is shaking his head like someone gone sun blind, oh god, he is bleeding, he is saying our names, he is praying, he is laughing like tv static, he is still fucking bleeding- The day before you left us, I told him “I think I saw the future last night”, and it was the last time I saw stars in his eyes
cassandra’s lament (i don’t know how you thought it was less of a curse to be always wrong and believed absolutely) (n.r.)












