Work Text:
You are my muse, Noelle.
I rearrange the alphabet and put you on the stars. Y, O, U are placed separately, otherworldly in my eyes when they glimmer and you are in the reflection. You are my universe, even when the furthest I have ever been is staring at birds outside my window frame. I am a prisoner in my own mind and you are the wildflower that is close enough to seed my hope. We will never see eye to eye on love, and that’s alright. Language is inadequate here so I study the way your tonal fluctuates of sociological knowings.
You are my age even when we don’t bleed the same because my blood is weaker and paler than the blush on your cheeks. According to my dad, people only bleed for the ones they love — but womanhood to us means prickling skin for all or nothing at all.
What is it to love? To look at the sunset and decide this phenomenon is only named after you when you are light years apart from its first appearance on Earth? I beg for an answer but no book will hold the key. There is more to be said than to be written, therefore poets turn into songwriters and you send me a track where the title is about love. Nothing is ever truly about love, or so you know and I put my headphones on.
To someone, you are eternally fourteen with round glasses and a politics of romantic courtship. You are telling a boy that you can never love him. When I was fourteen, I was bifurcated in masculinity and femininity, thumbs poked my long-sleeved hoodie and my bangs were dark. I don’t think you would like me, I say. You are forever loveable, you smile. This artifact — the you at fourteen with pop music and poems you reread until the corners were worn out with your touch — is a brief history and the way you bleed into me is a sieve.
In your warmth, I find myself as an archeologist.
I am digging deep for something that cannot be.
The truth feels stupid, I tell our friends because I love you is only a secret to the three syllables and the stars have already kept them neat. You sit on the floor with your back against a comet and hold my hands through the night. For the untrained eye, we are friends that bypass social norms with our togetherness. The meat of our conversation splits easily from bare bones. The truth is not stupid, Sucrose says gently and she has this melancholic tone to her words. I want to leave rather than confess, but I cannot say.
As a teen, I believed I was selfish.
Today, I know it could be true.
When people hit on you, men and women and bees, it feels rubbery and thick and I imagine this is what jealousy tastes like. There’s no intricacy. Fleshy and weak when you nod at crude compliments and think of the best, envy has never been bitter, just hard to swallow.
If I’m a good person, should my voice be brave and truthful to stop this discomfort?
I don’t have the courage to speak louder.
Losing slowly to the continuation of a name or a face you now know since they flirt with you in the ticking time bomb of my own convolution, the shape of our relationship is formed by three parts and I can’t arrange them in my mind.
Tick tock.
You are the softest thing and I will be a relic.
To love someone proudly is to carve out constellations in their names.
You are my favourite person, my personal radio channel, Noelle.
It’s ten in the evening and the texture of your voice is breaking me to pieces. It matters what I say, or don’t in this beautiful space where my body is a spark. I smile through the phone even when you can’t see my hands. You are the direct link to my many interests, drag it palm across my keyboard and we are whole. Few words, I would use though your sentences are always complete. You read me better than I can express myself.
You are telling me a story. One that isn’t gritty with dust. Hope is a line drawn from your heart to mine and I picture it pale, the nimbus glow of May when there is no rain. You have never liked heat, you smile into my shoulder and my breath is lodged inside. You have never liked it either, so I pray for cool weather, each night.
Perplexes me still, the ten thousand ways I must have said I love you in our teenage years and the two thousand times you replied back.
The irony is, we were both singing different lines of a song.
Now, you are talking about good and evil because I am crying and you don’t think there is any ounce of evilness inside my head. This is a nocturnal language I can’t transcribe, the sulk of smothering opacity where I nurse a cup of water and you’re telling me that I am good. I am not, I say, honest. If I were truly good, I would not fall for you in every worst way.
You are out of reach, Noelle.
Sometimes I wonder if God is listening in our conversations and my thoughts, intolerably disgusted by how much I want to hold your hands. My loneliness asks nothing of me when faith begs to differ and I am sitting in a confession booth. I cannot say aloud that I am in love with you, even when it’s my worst sin.
Twelve minutes and I am looking at a meteor shower where your name is flying back down to Earth with every alphabet letter I have sent heavenward. Thoughtless, I let myself be consumed by your beauty and inadequacy is my fingers hovering over yours.
Nobody is born with all the answers on their sleeves, I am told repeatedly again by our friends and strangers and the echoing of my own thoughts. The moon is a floating lantern by my window frame today and I am still a prisoner.
You are my friend, Noelle. Non-existent in this denial but taking up all the space in my heart.
When I am a thousand miles away from your arms, your stories, from the people that wish to kiss you raw on kind lips and we both bleed in womanhood because love is collapsing into oneself until we’re whole — how pointless it is to question the paradoxical nature of when I have fallen for you.