1/11/25
my flaw is i read everything wrong. on the brown walls of your bedroom described a list of books in arabic spread in a swooping, deliberate hand. a yellow book, the one i found. the words: “then fuck me.” i found more traces of your scrawling, impatient hand like an artist had set an explosion in you from the inside out
in the dream you explained why i could not have you “because i am leaving; july 8th.”
“the 101 letters you wrote to me in love are nothing compared to the 500 i wrote for you, so don’t mourn,” or something along those lines. you said these things things so beautifully even here i cannot describe what it was like laying my eyes over them.
in the walls of this dream i wrote confessions of my love, fervently and in a passion, like needing to be over an illness. resigned and passionate and spewing — i had lost control completely of myself. in the email back you were calm. you revealed yourself back to me, almost as if at last you decided to draw the curtain back because i was acting so much like a child, pining and groping the leg of a parent for one drag of sweetness.
though those were merely false perceptions of feedback as i gazed in the mirror. the information one’s eye receives in the span of a single moment always hiccups and hesitates. meaning we assign is arbitrary. this is how easily worlds full of hope can rupture, how quickly worlds of indifference are built. when a girl assigns true definition to things she can then remove them. only once she opens up her fist of falsehoods that bind her to a false happiness.
my current self has seen the true end. that by now both our backs are turned. there is no risk of relapse. no matter how much i begged for a glimpse of the future back then, i swear nothing could have prepared me for how catastrophically sad it would make me. there is no way to write to you how deeply aware i am that something is lost. i feel it within the folds of my dreams which shackle me to my bed, decorating icicles of sweat along my brow. in the end it isn’t your fault. these are just the cycles and cycles of time we must survive through.
this is the curse of writers: you don’t love yourselves. no matter how many attempts you make at self-improvement, no matter how many leaps of faith you pose in the right direction, putting as much distance as possible between you and all haunted past versions of yourselves that hungered after things both inedible and untrue, you still think of people you have loved just to account for spilled blood. you ponder questions you shouldn’t and your mind traitorously wanders, exploring the bad avenues of time and running a moment through with a sword over and over again, hacking away until the rot reveals itself. just so you can be satisfied. just so you can be certain. just so you can find the very point at which the knife was sunk, where it split your skin and made you inhuman. the difference between human and inhuman is that one knows fleeting pain and one knows a permanent one, and for a moment you glimpsed the latter. and the problem with writers is that you want to keep glimpsing it. just to celebrate that it happened to you because that is all that gives your life meaning: your ability to tell the doctor just where it hurt, how it hurt, to slow down time right to the moment of the effortless fall, the ease with which you fit yourself inside the crevice of it perfectly. you tell the doctor it was like you were made for each other. that there is no chemistry greater than a human and a pulsing object of pain.
you enter each stage of this grief over and over just to keep in your grip the false, insatiable imagining. to keep the machine in the brain turning, the wheel relentless, the work endless and unfolding.
as a new season beckoned, sharp-edged in its rapid approach, i watched your body undergo subtle changes, changes that try to break a lover’s heart because of how sweet and how beautiful it is and that every mouthful is yours to savor. humans are fucking incredible to mourn for a thing that isn’t there. or at least to mourn for a thing long vanished from the physical plane but preserved tightly in the mind, the mind which is a liar with candy in its teeth.
i have seen myself retreat into love’s vice-like grip time and again. being coaxed by the lullaby. moving forward and retracting. slinking closer and reverting back. i think of how you loved me so severely in that silent, desperate way and how our hearts were still rendered incapable for one another. it’s time i stopped trying to detangle and unwind and pick apart the pieces of what the fuck happened up there and what the fuck did they do to mess it up. they promised us. in a sickening hole deep in the ground where i once lay i swore i knew more about you than the earth did. and this is where they’ve vengefully placed us.
but stop. you must not think on it that way. you must be the shovel patting away, and the dirt covering up, and the bodies lying obediently in the ground — you must be all three at once. resist all temptation at twisting the tale any further. there is only one accurate unfolding of the story and that power was not bestowed to you. it is disgustingly over. it has been for a while.