You took up more space within me than should have been allowed. That autumn the gray light broke through the trees and the cold arboreal land lay adrift in plumes of fog. Birds flooded the skies -- schools of warblers and goldfinches and crowned sparrows, a hawk that swooped with the regality of a honed predator far above. It was worlds away from the place you’d brought me to in the little northern city, tucked between the rain-dark forest and the quiet blue lake, where your brother had skipped stones across the water. But those were different days, different times.
Instead I spoke the language you’d taught me. It was almost like an animal’s method of communication, full of half-starts and hesitation, the turning of a face into an open hand. I was unfamiliar with such displays of patience in men, and I’d also long suspected that something dark lurked at the core of everything I cared for. When I couldn’t find it in you — the poisonous center, the cold black anger that lifts only rarely to the eyes — I reacted, frantic, in the only way I knew how: by planting it in you myself.
You had two different faces. At night you were transformed.
I tried to think of the stranger I’d drunkenly confessed my love to a few months before. I tried to think of your brother. I tried to think of the roads I’d driven before I met you, how that certain cut of light would be forever lost to me now, the slow sure happiness I held like water cupped in my palm. I could only think of you.
Do this, you said—do that. You’re wearing too much; you’re wearing too little. I want to see the line of your throat when you gasp — I want to see everything. “If you don’t give me what I want, then I’ll take it.” I was stupid enough to consider it a promise rather than a threat. And then your slow exhale, a sigh into the gorgeous morning: “Of course I like you, can’t you tell?”
These nightly humiliations were rituals in the purest sense. When you watched me through the lens and snapped the shutter, what did you really see?
To you, it was justice. To me it was intolerable. I’ve only taken so long to write this down because the words wouldn’t come; some stories aren’t pretty enough to tell. They’re too outlandish even in the confines of my head; sometimes I look back and think it happened to someone else entirely. People loathe cliches for a reason, and your sweetly coaxing words — “You’re actually stupid enough to like this, aren’t you?” — only stung because, in a way, they were true.
The past isn’t a road wound peacefully in our wake. The past is a spray of shrapnel; the past is an anchor.
I’m writing this to no one, knowing that you move throughout the world as if everything you caused to occur never did. You watched me tip back pills until the edges of my vision were blurred, directing me to try a little harder, beg more convincingly; the irony is not lost on me. You were unmoved. The restraint you showed was devastating; there’s nothing more compelling than the complete absence of desire. I think I pattern my infatuations after you even now: men who are aloof and indifferent, women who couldn’t love me even if they tried.
I wanted to carve a space for myself within you, but instead all I did was shape an emptiness I couldn’t fill. You left no bruises but shame aplenty; you killed a part of me with unnatural ease. And if this was my funeral, the wake, the eulogy – send no flowers, because I do not deserve them, and I know that neither do you.