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I hope you had it easy. I hope you didn’t cry for help because it never came. There is tragedy everywhere. Mine is very pathetic.
What are the chances for someone loveless to find it here? On the open ocean? By the lighthouse? From some romance novels but not from mine. I found you beneath the surface of the sea in the great dark trench where we both had come to hide. The light just barely reached us through miles of suffocating waves and your words turned to bubbles under the salt so all I could see was your papier mâche face full of thumbprints, and then I disintegrated. You reshaped me with your love.
Pain can’t last forever though it shadows me. I swim miles parallel to the shore, and the water stretches out my limbs so the balls of mourning in my joints can have their space to breathe. Sometimes I stretch so wide that I go completely numb and I float on my belly til I wash up on the shore.
When it was me alone, death did not faze me. An inevitable reunion with the rift, my old friend come to cloak me in its robes, yes I know that cold embrace. But then you were beside me, made of metal and jasmine, and you had plans for this world and for the two of us, and there were days when I thought we’d get married - me and you, getting married, how domestic a prospect for we who have no home but in each other, I hoped you would ask me so I could give myself away to you forever. And then you were gone. A blip of a star swept off the horizon. I think I see the blur where you had been but it’s probably my tears.
I’m making a collage of you. A strange force compelled me. Here are the pieces. I have a cutout of the Pietà. And the head of a celebrity. And jetties wrapped in white muslin. And a PSA for world AIDS day. And two silver fishes from the table of a fishmonger in an ethnographic mag. I am not really an artist and I don’t think you’d like what I made. Heavy-handed with the Pietà, you would have scolded. I can’t even have your body in my lap.
Why did you punish me like this? There is no grave for my flowers or my tears. They left you behind. You are out there somewhere where no one but the birds can find you and I’m worried you’re cold, freezing cold, like you always were at night when I had to gather you up, touch your whole body. If they had just brought back your ring, the one that matched with mine, I’d have something to hold close. Instead they brought me to a conference room and told me you were lost. Like you were a kid in the store. What do you mean lost, and they looked at each other: which one of us has to be the one to let the wild man loose. I screamed that night, all night. They let me in your room so I could cry into your pillow that still smelled like our love together. Someone brewed me weak tea, mostly milk, and patted me on the shoulder, sorry bro. I’m so alone without you here. There is nothing, no one left for me, and I am tortured and useless. But I’m scared of leaving now, if we don’t end up in the same place. Where are you, my darling, the only one I’d dream of calling darling, I miss you so bad.
I hope you can hear me. It wouldn’t be the craziest thing in the world if you could. And if you can, I want to tell you that I love you, and I mean it more than all the times I said it when we fell asleep together, when you gave me the ring that I still wear, when I apologized for saying something rash, when you said it to me for the first time on the belvedere, when I said it to you when you left on the trip that we didn’t know would be your last; I have to say again I love you. I walk the world empty with no organs but my heart which, in truth, is thoroughly yours. You bewitched a boy who thought he could not love. And now, by evil magic, you are gone.