You’re no one from a past life, not a stranger who I know. I’ve never seen you on the street, crossed the lines to avoid your gaze - you’re entirely unfamiliar, the hard-set bones of your face amorphous in the settling light. I try to score these words with rhythms, a pattern to make sense of the disarray. But you’re no one to me, and as close as I draw you will only grow further away.
The wrong consonants skip off my tongue. Sentiment. Fondness. Preoccupation. You’re what never quite fits. I’ve written and erased these lines a dozen times and yet it doesn’t grow easier, explaining in words what can only be understood without them.
In my head you take up more space than you should be allowed. Of course I’ve thought of you somewhere far out to nowhere, head bowed against the receding honey-colored light, reticent and quiet and without words; sometimes our souls take photographs of things they have wanted but never seen. Just don’t idealize me, you said - there’s nothing in me worth idealizing. But it’s so easy to see the goodness in anyone but yourself.
I can see you like this: curled into yourself like a question mark, a cigarette hanging from your mouth, smoke dizzying the air around you. You, bent over at the waist with a bottle of cheap whiskey in your hand, sweet captured sunlight and the face you make when you swallow; your hair, the profusion of it made darker by the cast of light. I see you this way, then; lonely, and proud, and proud of that loneliness. This is what you do to keep the fear at bay: surround yourself with those whose hurts mirror yours, the deepest cuts of the dullest blades. Quiet eyes, your wrist flicking a lit cigarette out of the car window so that it sparks on the oily streets. Yes, I want to tell you - I think that I understand. But I don’t have the courage.
I want to dream myself into a place that I’ve never known. “Another world is possible,” I’ve read - broken hearts and broken bones, the widening of streets and of water. God help you, the priest told me the last time I entered a church - but it wasn’t what he really meant. May you help yourself. I see beers overflowing the icebox, shot glasses lined up like bullets, wine in tiny cups. I see this, and I see you, and I see the path we’ve left behind: my vices have always interested you more than my virtues. I don’t blame you for that. I don’t blame you for anything, this world that cut us astray, and I don’t blame all of my sins for looking just like you.