Our living room smells of cigarette smoke and the lilac of fresh milk.
And you’re looking at me with the smile I have grown to hate over the years, the smile that swallows you completely when you’re buzzed. How you bathe in it, the alteration, the blushing. How you ride it. As the trickles of a cold, smooth Australian Shiraz grooves through your veins as the bathwater rushed down the shower drain the night you dyed my hair red at midnight. All those summers ago. It has been a long time since heat.
As it goes. Pumped with wine, you feel quite riotous. And so you laugh. That bright rattle leaps from your big, gleaming mouth. And I can’t stand it. You are so easy going. Always making conversation with strangers in the middle of the grocery store or as we sit out on a cafe patio. Always the happy dog. Everybody wants you. And somehow you are here. Looking at me. My sunlight darling. My completed poem. My secret little wonder in a dirty t-shirt.
I would do anything for you.
Channel a perfect daughter into a test tube for you. Combust into an applause of confetti for you. Host wondrous parties for you. Clear out traffic with only my hands. Lick at the dust on the shelves. Look at what i have already done. This room, for example. All of the photos on the wall. I hung them. I picked out the wood panels for the floors and then made them shine. Our love is this blue couch upon which we fuck in the morning as sunlight preens through the curtains and eat bowls of frozen grapes and read the same stories over and over.
I have given up my America for you. Said goodbye to that comfortable, golden roar of desire. On my last day in New York I kissed a stranger – some bearded man who sat at the end of the bar by himself. He looked so small in comparison to the room which bolstered and screeched around him in wiggling neons. Smeared with the wildest of noise. All of those crooks and deities fading out all around him. He looked penciled in, an afterthought of whatever tortured, crippled artist commands us from above. I kissed him in one quick, hard movement. As I rolled my tongue into his, I was saying farewell to the life I once thought I wanted. Goodbye to all of the avenues that held me as I paced back and forth. Goodnight to every party I died at when I was a young idiot. I apologized as soon as I let him go. But he didn’t seem disturbed by the kiss. Perhaps he knew it wasn’t for him. Perhaps he couldn’t even feel it.
I have moved to Paris for you. I walk these purple, drunken streets. I smell the spritz of a new kind of nighttime, one that never seems to end. I didn’t mind the move. I have never minded doing things for you. But here I am in Paris. In this room with you. Sometimes when I wake up to your warmth beside me I am relieved. And frightened.
I do think I love you. But it isn’t enough. There was a point where I truly believed it was. But we are going to ruin the crushed, blue velvet. We are going to break through the cushions.
Outside, a powdering of recent snow lies across the streets, across all of the buildings. White like the shavings of a grand tooth. Last month, I turned thirty two in a room filled with your friends, artists and writers and interesting people with interesting things to say. I got drunk in a green dress and felt old.
Our small television offers a sitcom in French. A woman holds a leather briefcase as a man fixes his tie. A woman stands quite still. A man fixes his tie with his hands. A woman says nothing. A man laughs. I grab the bottle and fill your glass again, stopping halfway. You put your hand on my thigh. I feel it.
You, angel in my bed. You, wings sprawled across our sheets, wings glowing beneath the kitchen lights, wings tickling my evil. It’s easy to live when you’re in love, Billie Holiday once sang. Those tinkling piano chords gone dumb with affection. I don’t know what I am doing here with you. I’m a demo waiting to be buffed out. I’m a scene left on the cutting room floor. My soul glimmers with filth.
And you are blind. How I wish I could be blinded, too. But I see. Through the thin mucous that glosses over everything and right down the split of morning and night. I am not the same as you. All you want is a bright room to simmer in. I want to be stretched across the cold table of oblivion.
What will we do when the lights go out and we are truly left alone with only one another? I am afraid to know. So I love you. So we drink. So we fuck. So we invent new ways to touch one another. So you say my name into my mouth. So you suck my teeth. So I wear your boxers to go to sleep. So I stalk the windows when you leave.
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