I was killing myself from the start, my initial decomposition originating at the vulnerable age of 18. Death meant nothing in those years. I was obsessed with life, and light, and all the glorious strains of sun on my honey-hued shoulders. Existence was like a vibrant summer, even then; it came too early and left too soon.
But what does that even mean—a beginning? The pain only comes when you remember. I have blurred vision from those days, my eyesight slightly skewed, the memories drawing only further and further away. Sweet honey whiskey and the poorest vodka, the forest evergreen of gin. How many mornings did I wake in someone else's bed, head heavy and tongue filmed with alcohol, the evening before nothing but a dizzying blur?
I remember one solitary July night, redolent with silence and the spice of summer blooms, the nocturnal heat seeping into my skin. I was watching your garden die, sunflowers swooning and tulips gracefully bowing their heads, you observing me from across the loam. It wasn’t long before wandering hands caught up with wandering eyes — the blaze of touch trailing white hot along your fingertips. Soft sighs. Reclusion. Isolation blurring the lines of want. You mapped me out with your hands, gentler than I deserved and gentler than I’d come to expect. I would have burned the world for you, you know. I burned myself instead.
Whoever said time heals all wounds had never seen ours, and I was unsure which pain was worse: the shock of what happened or the ache that we never would. I’d opened my heart so that I could breathe and instead only choked on the gusty air, the emptiness of all that space between us. I wanted so badly to transform, to reassemble the structure of the bones within me. To become someone – anyone – else. I was not so lucky.
“Fall for him, but don’t let him ruin you.”
But it was too late for that – I’d stumbled headfirst into your world, spent days at a time drinking on your moth-eaten couch, you running your fingertips along my slender forearm. One taste of whiskey and I could not go without it: then followed the pills, the painkillers, the stimulants which stirred me into a manic frenzy. There’s always a deeper wound, if you know just where to look. And mine had always been you.
It ended between us in silence, in the solitary glow of a kitchen light at midnight, us both strangers to the other. I measure love by how it ends; you always missed me more than you loved me. And when you left, so did I – two diverging paths in the midwest, open plains and aching blue sky, both of us washed in a beautiful loneliness. This was love, I came to believe: the leaving. And I could think of nothing worse than that.