some date i don’t remember

i have dreams of you putting things to rights, and what is right anymore, if it wasn’t you, if not my greatest friend sophomore year, loving and then losing her, the sureness of it all, how sure love can feel one moment and then staggering and flaky and broken the next, the immeasurability of the time we spent together, the certainty in our stares, the one 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 on the nape of your neck curling into your coat. i was in love with you, or with all or most that you allowed me to see. and what is more pure than that? i like to tell.

yes 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, my body that all it can do is scream. i loko 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.

11/22/23

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 book, a child, an angry letter. here, here, this is you, this is yours, you shouldn’t be in me. i don’t want to be your friend. i don’t want to get to know you. i love you to the point of illness.

10/27/24: counterpart

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

are they too disgusting to touch?

you took the step gingerly and it turned out to be the right one, the one you wanted, the one moving confidently away from passion. yes. 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 quiet, peaceful, empty 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 feel when you see the lifting of a smile that you are no cause of, a smile no longer yours to witness, yours to taste, to watch the progress of, how it touches my eyes? in the end, who are you then?

who was it that lost. i would like to believe you did. see?

this is dangerous. the returning. the coming back to it all. to write is to dwell, and i do not want to retrace my steps to the graveyard, uncover you with the toe of my boot where i patted you down with the flat of a cold shovel, so in contrast to how my heart burned

i am wondering if i have any say in the words at all because i can feel the risings already. it is a sick feeling, like when you drop a mattress in the middle of an empty room and all the dust and dirt and every hiding piece of decay rises into the air and shows itself. sometimes shining a light on things only does harm. sunlight in a room full of dust is not encouraging.

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.