Thanks for the topic @missy @rambo @lyxzen
US.
I couldn’t have ever imagined how much my life would have changed the day I finally mustered the courage to ask her out for coffee. I always thought of her as so fragile. I thought that with one wrong move, she would break apart. But I was wrong. She was resilient. She was quiet-- that much was true-- but she was thoughtful, and playful; she could be still as fallen leaves or as lively as a child.
When you talked about literature, her eyes lit up and she came to life. She was especially fond of poetry. After our first date together, I ordered a copy of the Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Collected Poems from a bookstore a few streets down from where I worked. When I gave it to her, her eyes widened so that I could see the whole of her large brown irises; she flashed her small teeth, her nose, powdered with freckles, crinkling. She said that that book was the best gift she had ever gotten – not a week later she would begin to recite Millay’s works to me:
“What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten….”
I will never forget our time together.
I remember, after we had another date, I cautiously slipped my hand into hers. She pretended not to notice my awkwardness, squeezing my hand to let me know that it was welcome.
I kissed her that night, while a smile played at the corners of her mouth, the sun flecking her hair with streaks of red and blonde. I moved too quickly, too strangely, but she kissed me back; not softly, not how I expected or had ever been kissed before, but like she meant it.
Like she meant for all of it.
Like we were meant to happen, splashed across the page in haphazard splatters that somehow conceived the most beautiful patterns. My time with her was a blazing fire or smoldering coals; we were never the dying embers I had seen in the relationships of my married friends.
I wonder, now, if all of that would have been the same.
I will never have the chance to know.
I taste the red on my lips,
My tongue is a scalpel,
Licking up the salt.
I dig the pit out with my fingernails,
It pops like a socket
Inside pink skin ripe and round
As an olive,
And I begin to peel away the layers
As though they belonged to an artichoke
Or anything with a heart.
I taste the fleshy morsel
With my red scalpel tongue.
It stings like a scorpion
And I find I can no longer remember
The taste of your pink olive skin
And the sharp bite of salt,
Or your hands,
Which peeled away my layers
As though they belonged to an artichoke.
YOU.
It started on a Tuesday. I remember the smell of rain on your skin. I remember the trace of a smile on your lips when I slid out from next to you, kissing your cheek softly. I remember the stark darkness of your hair splayed across our sheets, like some auburn halo. I remember thinking that this was the first morning, a day in our endless life together. When I replay those moments in my mind, they are in another world that time hasn’t touched. In that world, there is nothing that would tear us apart. Time is forever and halting there with you, your lips smiling, your skin flushed with the life pulsing inside you.
I knew that I loved you that day.
You will never leave my body; your fingerprints are traced on my skin-- in places I did not know a person could touch and would never touch that way again. There is a hole where you left, it is in the shape of you and no one else could ever fill it. Every follicle of your being is halted in my memory, your smile you only gave to me warming my entire body from the inside. The white, cold blankets are full of you. When I sleep in our bed I feel you rolling over me in waves, the sheets telling me the story of our love-- the story of our lives between them. Part of me died in that small achromatic room with you. Sometimes I think that you took my heart with you when yours stopped beating, and maybe I am gone with you and this is purgatory, where everything screams of you but you are far from reach.
I will always love you.
I am sitting with my hands clasped beside you. The sheets on your hospital bed are pale as you; I can barely make out where they start and you stop. You smell like you but you don’t. You smell of medicine and soap and the crisp whiteness of the hospital walls and the nurse’s hands and surgical tools and blood and death but under all of that I can still smell you. Somewhere on your body is that smell of rain and grass and warmth. That smell of you would not exist if you were gone but you are. I know it the way that I know every cell of your body, every hair on your head, every eyelash, every movement, all the secret parts of you. I sit with my hands clasped; to touch you would certainly break the barrier that traps us in this moment, where the doctors are finally gone and you and I are alone and the room is filled with my love and your death. If I touch you, I will have to leave. Our love will end in this room. I will only think of your cold flesh, the thin pressed mouth that has always been you but isn’t now. None of this can be you because it doesn’t make sense. I don’t understand the cancer that took up lodging in your brain, pushing all that makes you you to the edges of your skull, breaking you apart from the inside. I don’t understand how your genes changed in you rapidly, how the metastasis planted itself and grew wildly. As I unclasp my hands and stand, I kiss your forehead. It is cold and full of cancer and you are gone.
