What if it really was God, though, and He decided I just wasn’t worth it?
You were the one who taught me how to leave. There were thousands of ways to say good-bye, you told me, and so few to say hello - the dialect between us was written in partings. I waited for you to come and then for you to go: in the night, in the morning, in predawn’s violet flush. You had countless kinds of farewells and I could feel them in every limb of my body, every rush of heated blood; this was how we existed to one another. This was how we spoke, the two of us. Not in whispers but in lies.
Your affection was a drug that couldn’t be traced. Your hand on my bruised wrist, the jut of your hip against the dip of my side, marking out maps on my skin. Throat, mouth, hair - you spent hours tracing the body that I’d come to know as someone else’s, someone who was not - who couldn’t be - me. Each of your absences felt like an ending. I was wary of breaking this fragile thing between us, terrified of holding you so tightly that I would be the hand around your closing throat. When I left your apartment I’d wander the streets before returning to my car, the lack of you like an open wound salted and stinging, two lovers who would never be in love.
I’d written an elegy for the loss of you far before I lost you. I sat at night on the porch swing in my backyard, bare-footed in the heat of summer. I smoked cigarette after cigarette, my hand drifting over the page, crossing out every other word, every apology until the morning birds came to join me. Forgetting is a form of forgiveness, I think. The moon was still cleaved in half by shadow in the sky. I saw it then as a metaphor of you - half concealed, half light, always out of reach. The rest of them could have the stars; I wanted something more.
There are people whom you positively ache to please. I didn’t understand why: why the expression on your face softened the cruel edges inside of me, how when I was with you I wanted to peel my skin away and find someone better underneath. You were too gentle for a man, too soft, too kind — this frightened me more than it would have if you hadn’t been. Cruelty is easy, cruelty is sharp — kindness is enough to terrify. Kindness is beauty, and whatever beauty is, we quiver before it. I never liked light eyes until I saw yours, I wanted to tell you. I always wanted to tell you. But I never got the chance.
You left. It didn’t matter, though, because when you diseappeared–in a way– so did I. One instant there, another vanished. I would have been kinder, softer, sweeter—but none of it mattered. We were never meant to get any further than we did. Let it be, I can imagine my mother saying, take a breath and let it be.