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You are not expected to return. No one will come looking. This is the first and only formula you learn to memorize in the grand, starving equation of making things happen. And it’s not even really that you’re expendable, or destined to join dust; it’s just that you have to make yourself nothing in order for people to overlook you doing something. Fingers flexing around cause. Terror bright and biting at the thought of losing it. How do you maintain a grip on a fever that you must daily swear does not even exist? Coursing and pulsing. Oaths made against nature. Dusk blooms and gapes and is overcome, and there you are, a dour fit against the mercurial swath of midnight flattened in sticky, draping shapelessness against the hollow corners of downtown nowhere. Swaying within the delta of alleyway dark. Converge and pour out. Your feet ghost over riverlines.
The dark is magnanimous. It forgives you. And you don’t crave absolution, not in the way freedom fighters do, because fight implies choice. Fight implies resolution. You have neither. That exonerates you: the incessance, the way your body has matured only within the confines of a war waged in split-lipped crevices, tissue torn by pace and sinew wrapped around tenet. But it soothes, anyway, even when you do not hunger for it. Everything is the same when the lights are out. Nothing can be known. Hands move with feeling and breaths curl like smoke and skin pebbles in long lines of thrill, devoid of witness to your desire.
There’s always someone, though, isn’t there? A tryst that kisses humility into your broken appetite for obfuscation. She teaches you all the ways someone can hold you captive without ever knowing your name. It is thorough. It is a searching thing. Like she knelt in promise and came up for air only when answers came flooding to her unsparing mouth. And you’re angry about it, because of course you are. Because this isn’t the generous venture of liquid night. This isn’t the dose you were promised. No, this is something greater. This is the oath warborn flesh stole from you. This is absolute, because you bent so tenderly and severely into the warmth of her being that you never felt her reaching hand, tremulous, where it switched on the light.
You’re angry, because of course you are. But you are turning your head into the sweat-slicked column of her throat and crushing your mouth to her permanence and discovering forgiveness there, anyway. The light’s on. Closeness is dim enough, dimness is close enough. Goosebumps travel your skin like stars.
You are not expected to return. No one will come looking. But you’re hiding in her all the same. Who chooses this? Who can be blamed? I mean — who says it can’t be you? You, who closed your eyes? You, who let her supplicant palm wander? You, who let her, who wanted her, who begged her to try?