I think I saw you first in a dream. Broad face like a cat’s and vulpine cheekbones, eyebrows long as brush strokes and slender as willow leaves. You had a luminescent and open quality to your features, like an elf’s or a seraphim’s, that everyone always mistook for innocence. As a result you were an interesting creature, impatient and unlovely in nature, but still somehow magnetic. People always watched you. You drew eyes like flies to honey.
Now I imagine you reading my words, every syllable and intonation, every hidden turn of phrase that I worked so hard to conceal. You will never know that this is about you.
You were like a language I’d once known but had now forgotten, a song whose melody escapes me entirely. I used to imagine the pair of us far out to nowhere, in the poignant empty plains where I could rest my head and where you could sleep. A beat-up car with a broken radio, the sky disordered and wild with stars. I had a dozen different dreams and you were in every one of them. I remember running my hand through your dark cropped hair, soft as a fawn’s throat and shorn close, and the heartbreaking blue of your eyes. You sat outside of the motel with your gaze shaded, feet kicked up on the railing, a bottle of cheap off-brand soda in one hand and a fifth of Swedish vodka in the other. I would have burned the world down for you, I remember telling you—and you smiled then like I’d meant it. Maybe I had.
We both liked to drive just before the rain, loved how the light always held itself in just a certain way. The gleam of sunshine throwing a gleam onto the gold of your dark hair, your frail wrists—too slender for a man, too slender, but marked also with gruesome tattoos. How many tattoos do you have? I asked you once, and you said you didn’t know — you’d forgotten, just as you’d forgotten so much else.
How quickly someone you know becomes someone you knew. We kept to ourselves in the darkest ways, abusing shot glasses filled with tepid vodka and pints of sweet whiskey-rye. We’d each sworn that people belong to people and not to a place; we promised we’d never part. But I didn’t belong to you, and you didn’t belong to me, and our brief mistakes—shirts and jackets strewn across the room, you holding me up against the wall with a hand over my mouth—vanished as soon as we each left the bed.
“Another secret,” you would always say before you left. I didn’t know if you meant the shame or the scratches down your back, and it wasn’t my place to ask.