10/27/24: counterpart
10/28/24
yes you almost slipped into a trance you almost fell in love with a girl your freshman year and allowed her to change the course of your strong steady life
you managed to save yourself from the terror and uncertainty and slipping your body that i was to know, off the tall cold building, with your feelings all awry
you took the step gingerly and it turned out to be the right one. the one moving assuredly away from passion. you managed to save yourself from what i would’ve done to you but how long really is your relief to last you?
what joy can be found in your empty quiet life where you can no longer afford to glimpse my smile because it does not belong to you? where it is no longer your pain and joy to see the lifting of a smile that you are no cause of, a smile no longer yours to watch the progress of, how it creeps into my eye?
in the end, who are you without the love that would have given you a chance? the love that wanted you more than you wanted yourself?
this is dangerous, the returning. the coming back to it all. i told a friend recently, to write is to dwell. and i do not want to retrace my steps into the graveyard, uncover you with the toe of my boot where i patted you down with the flat of a cold shovel, firm and absolute
i am wondering if i have any say in the words at all because i can feel the risings already. i used to pray, used to plead that we could leave it at that. that there would be no revival. i am only ever here and you forever there. and i am asking of that power again — let us leave it here where it can die. let us leave the lungs of our feelings, of what miraculously could have been, choked beneath the grass and graves we will lie in. years from now, where we will learn the tang of regret.
11/22/23
i have dreams of you putting things to rights. but what is right anymore if it wasn’t you? how sure love can feel one moment and then staggering and broken the next. the immeasurability of the time we spent together, the certainty in our stares, the ones i don’t talk to anymore, what is certain anymore except me?
i have loved now so many, and never myself and now standing here alone this journey has always just been a circle, leading me back to myself. i was looking at your eyes from far away, from a side, a piece of the hair at the nape of your neck curling into your coat. pieces of you always hiding. i was in love with you, or with all that you allowed me to see. what is more pure than that, i like to say.
now i guess it is rotting it is dying, growing cold and heavy in my hands; but i gave it and have given it my all. and coming out of it then who am i even, who am i? how dare i keep existing like this, in love and neglecting the body that loves. i look towards and away from myself; i love and can’t stand her. i love her and wish i could take her, press her to me. whisper that without love we are still all right
even if i reached my stupid hand across this stupid universe and raised a white flag, you wouldn’t let your guard down. would you. i love you and it can’t mean anything to you. i love you so much i wish i could reach my hands into my body and take out your influence. take all of you out and give it to you. it would be enough of you inside me to give you something, a final finished product. a collection of poems spun and bound into a book. a child. you shouldn’t be in me. i don’t want to be your friend, i don’t want to get to know you.
i loved you to the point of illness. you lost that, but maybe that is good for us.
maybe i would have stripped the peace from your lungs and sucked the goodness dry; who knows?