I found myself looking at me and the voice in my head said, I love you. It took a minute to realise I wasn’t talking to you and another to assimilate the shock. I’ve never said it to myself. I never knew I could or that if I did I might mean it. I said it again just to check and wept. I love you. I sat and wondered. Did I come across this myself or did you give me the key? Which thread of fate was wandered and was it alone or did we walk a similar road?
I tell her, I think I made you up. She agrees but differently and laughs a little at me. ‘Solipsistic isn’t it? What if I made you up?’ Honestly, I’d considered it and decided if that were the case then I have nothing left to be afraid of, she made me exactly the way she’d intended. You are perfect, I tell her. She smiles and it is beyond imagination. ‘I’m just a mirror, honey.’ I look into her eyes and see myself forever in them. Whether I’ve invented you or you me, I don’t care because now it’s real.
Sharing space together but me separating myself by insecurities, an evolutionary vestige still clinging to my chrysalis. You know, it’s not always going to be sonnets and sunshine, I say. There might be times where it’s gloom too, and grey. Arris smiles with her eyes and opens her mouth wide, unleashing a kaleidoscope of butterflies. They flock around the room, flutter, flap, and fill every available space, countless wings in the colour of all things beating their response upon the stillness in the air, a chaotic order of magnitude. So, I say, it doesn’t matter? And the butterflies abate.
Love is rubbing your lover’s feet after the shitty day you’ve had. Love is saying fuck off and meaning it, knowing it means nothing. Love is pimples and concealer, ravishing boredom and humdrum thrills. Love is accepting the smells, ignoring the implications. Passive, aggressive, slovenly, exacting, love is human and fallible, gross and divine. A trust fall in a bottomless pit, love is the knowledge you may never be caught before the bottom is hit. Love is invisible, immutable, transient and staid. Love is acceptance and longing and that being said, let me just say, I love you, instead.
Arris looks right into my eyes and I shiver so hard I think I might die. ‘Are you ok,’ she says. I tell her I think she hit a nerve. I can feel her pressed against my being, strumming across my sinews like some cosmic harpist. The sound of a solitary droplet striking the surface of a subterranean spring. I quiver, don’t die, and listen to it resonate. ‘I can hear you thinking,’ she says, a tuning fork tapped against bone. Inside my skull, I say, I don’t doubt it, and she smiles wide enough to swallow me whole.
Standing by the cliff, she says, ‘I want you to push me first and then dive in after to save me.’ I don’t ask why and she laughs and the harness tightens. ‘Are you scared?’ Only of losing you, I say. ‘Don’t worry,’ she says, ‘after this you’ll have only lost fear.’ I can almost see her skin eating the sunlight, caramel clashing and consuming the blue. She turns to face the cliff and the future and says, ‘Now fucking push me.’ I put my hands to the small of her back and whisper in her ear, I love…
A tiny brow crease and wrinkle of the little pock that lives above the left. There’s something in her eyes. They’re glistening, not with tears but a spectrum, a fast vastness that ripples and contorts and plays across the iris like a borealis flirting upon the tundra. This thing in her eyes, it doesn’t hurt but does carry fear; it doesn’t propel, but does carry hope; it doesn’t carry her, but does makes her float. The brows push together more, increasing indent. There’s something in her eyes. There’s a word for it, wholly inadequate but labelled, an unbearable lightness.
It wasn’t the knife or the way she held it that scared me, it was years of experience and the absentminded way it undercut her words, waiving it limply along like a conductor‘s baton on a broken wrist. ‘Did you lie to me because you’re an asshole or because you thought you’d get away with it?’ Neither, I say. A bad answer for a worse question. She had me backed into an actual corner. ‘So, what, you just did it for fun?’ I felt the absurd teeth of semantics closing on me and nearly laughed myself to death.
I never told you I was good, I guess that’s the difference between being a shitty person and a really shitty person. ‘Is that,’ Laura closes her eyes and does that cliché brow rub thing, ‘is that your excuse? I should’ve known you’d be a prick because you never promised to be nice?’ She grabs the nearest thing, a dollars worth of Ikea plate, and flings it past me to land on the couch with the apathetic thump of an empty threat. That was sorta shitty, I say. Laura weighs another plate, ‘I never promised to have good aim.’
It actively hurts to love you, I say, I wish it didn’t, but your presence has become the biggest part of my day. I feel like I’m throwing chunks of caring down a well, breaking off hulking parts of my compassion and trying to catch a ghost with the remains. I miss you and I love you and it hurts so much to feel those things in your shadow. I wish you still loved me, though I hope that you’re happy, I say, I hope that you’re having fun and living your best life. My phone says nothing back.
When I think about us I feel more isolated then ever. I see these two lone hands stretching into an abyss, trying of course to grasp each other, so far apart. Sometimes they cling to satellites, clutching until they crush their quarry into orbital debris. Most often they float alone, grazing their surfaces upon that vast satin blackness, reading braille whispers of liveable planets and binary systems that support each other until death, glorious love sick symbioses gasping un petit mort en supernova. When I think about us I think about the horizon and wonder what I’m not seeing.
We bowed below the Meiji Jingu gates, held hands as we threw our wish in tandem yen into the well. I wondered long after if I’d prayed hard enough, revenant or pious enough. Now I look at photos of then, see her absence, and know prayers aren’t answers and wishes won’t build horses. I know it. I have gained knowledge through action, gnosis in practice. I know it. But what I wouldn’t pay to wish again, pray again, wrap the facts in faith again and fling them far as hope can go. What I wouldn’t pay again for love.
You know how when someone you love, someone you’ve shared everything with and you trust and respect and have complete faith in but also enjoy that passive acceptance bred out of total familiarity, when someone like that says I love you and you say I love you back in a totally rote fashion, not disingenuous but so automated through fidelity that it becomes an ignorable key structure in your day to day? You know that feeling? That voice tells me I deserve to die and I always say, of course I do, in a totally rote fashion, of course.
The beach has always been cold to me, no matter how I’ve loved it, but I go there often and take my loves with me. Like Caleb, confidant and strong with beautiful form and numbing passion. ‘You can’t help me,’ he said, stripping to skin, ‘even if I’m struggling,’ and walked into the waves without hesitation. I’ve always respected the tide and its wishes, the soft inevitability and reassuring repetition of predictable chaos. So I sat above the water line with the prickled edges of pre-glass sticking to my flesh, thinking of love and watching while Caleb drowned.
When I was young I might have called them butterflies, now I don’t know. It’s an anxious swell, the jittery presage of a panic attack all twisted up with ideas about love, lust, and loath, like being tickled to the point of pain. I want to dive in deep and run away far, I want all or nothing. I can’t seem to resolve myself and the wings keep beating a goddamn maelstrom in my stomach, a tattoo on my heart, and emotional tinnitus wringing in the mind. When I was young I might have called it potential for happiness.
A Few Short Words 