We’re sitting on the front porch I never thought I’d see, and you feel so out of reach. What hasn’t lately? The cold shrinks my skin up against me, presses into that warm core that keeps me living when I think I can’t possibly be.
It stings my eyeballs—which is a good thing— a logical reason to fight back tears. But this battle is constant. My whole body like the married couple: Stuck in a loop of the same bother, always manifesting itself in new monotonies.
And I’m weak.
In muscle I nearly never had,
in resolve lost.
I want to tell you how the last time you knew me I was okay, how the last time was a different lifetime. I want you to know me because I think that you could, but I’m so fucking scared. So I just look up and smile (Are you convinced?), and I say the polite things (Do I want you deceived?), until my skin hurts and I struggle to know we aren’t strangers.
These past few days I drank to pretend. I kept at it until it didn’t feel like pretending.
I was up in the air but I belonged to my body.
What a dizzy wonder that was, wanting to be connected to my flesh.
All parts of me remembered how to move. I didn’t worry what that looked like,
I just reveled in the energy, which was an old toy by the time your arm was lazy over my shoulder. More so when your hands hovered in my surrounding space and you clutched every time I shook.
Because I got myself all the way up, carried away with happy, forgetting to check for ground.
The music swelled and swallowed. I still felt it when I woke this morning, hazy and drunk but without the right setting. The alone drunk that pulled me piece from piece like the first crude sketch. Today I am a rough draft tearing between fingers.
I worry that you only worry for the messy me, the happy, sloppy, edge of my seat me. Because we’re sitting on this porch in cold blood, our parents’ blood, divided into two characters that refuse to reconcile; blood still poisoned enough to share a moment no one else is awake for, and there is more silence than thought.
Your hands warming each other in the safe outline of your chair,
which is not even touching mine.
You’re not really here with me when you don’t see imminent danger. You don’t know how you need to be. You don’t know that it is a constant, that it is the healing I crave, not the catching.
I have already fallen each waking hour, each eye opening to the world and learning I’m still in it. This is just another calamity to fill the body I’m not filling.
And I am ruined when our hug is awkward. I am so much smaller than I ever thought I’d stay, while you grow in every breath.
I say I love you more than is necessary, because with nothing else this has to stay true, because I know you will have to say it back.
As the cab pulls away from you, towards the polite questions of strangers no one wants to answer, I give you one more smile from the backseat.
I’m sorry it’s not you in the front. I wonder if it’s really that different.
I watch you get smaller but I still don’t grow.
I love you I love you I love you
I revise you right off my page.
