i. I think our summer secrets are some kind of holy. Our journals, somewhere between poetry and scripture. We talk astrology and tarot and pretend we know what’s coming. We never catch the sunrise, but we sit beneath the stars while you smoke out of the reach of your mother’s nose. I point out orion’s belt, ursa major too on a good day, but after that I’m stumped. Even the sky knows we’re waiting, waiting. That this place doesn’t hold us anymore, is not enough to keep us breathing.
ii. I am wine stained lips and you are cigarette smoke and we are both afraid but running from different things. We have grown a darkness we did not anticipate. Soon, you will go back to cobblestones and cruelty, to fighting page by page. I will go back to the place I was drowning in and I will find a way to swim. On the days the ink binds me, you will remind me that real people aren’t tragic heroines and I will feel a little less paper thin.
iii. The scars on the fields we watched unflourish now grow a different shade of alive. We will learn how to work around this. We can’t undo the tinfoil tortures last winter gave us, can’t take back the panicked calls and the boy who came to you too many times and the one I wish I’d locked out. We were left in a violent silence, learnt how sharp eyes can wound, how a gaze can be a fist. This is not supposed to be art, I don’t think. Sometimes watercolour is the only way we can look at it.
iv. There is something unspeakable for all of us about things that did not hurt before. For me: an unmade bed, midnight mint breath, long fingers. Months writing since and I still can’t bend the words to reflect the details clinging to my throat. I wring my nightmares for every last drop of poetry. You say we are bleeding our wounds fertile. We want to grow something out of this, I guess.
v. We both understand that just turning up can be a battle, so we have to let it be enough. Survival is not always war, some days it is a mission, addiction, obligation. We have been the matchstick, the forest fire, the ash, the phoenix. Maybe we stumble too easily, but we learn to be enough.