when I lost myself I thought of you

I thought that if he opened a vein it wouldn’t bleed. Coarse-skinned and blue-eyed, voice like the last clear breath I’d drawn for hours. I’d invested so much time and effort in denying the truth that I no longer knew what to believe -- and then there he was, all that temperate kindness and my reluctant admiration, trying to repeat these inimical patterns as if I’d been born to every one. We abused ourselves in the quietest ways, shot glasses and beer cans and bottles of tepid whiskey, shoulders brushing on the quiet Detroit streets and the light setting fire to the red in his hair. And I needed someone. I needed someone who wasn’t you.

My heart was too full of beauty to admit fear. I can remember one of the last nights of summer, the cicadas filling the air with purring sound, the heat humid on my damp skin. He was drinking from two half-empty flasks, offering me lukewarm vodka and the cheapest rye and the barest traces of early autumn wind. This was where it began and where it would end, he told me, holding me gently in his eyes – the world is circular, and so are we.

We were always saying goodbye. I only turned to him because I could not turn to you. Unhappiness, he had told me, was the human condition. And we only belong where we’re not.

I didn’t know him, but a part of me loved him, and the rest of me didn’t know why.

We spent days wasting the time away, kneeling on his old sofa with our foreheads each pressed against the other, our breathing even and sweet. I thought of you — of course I thought of you — but he was edging his way into my heart, and I wondered if he’d been my phantom limb all along.

At this point I was living in someone else’s dream. Nothing of my life seemed my own. His eyes were blue, yours were black, and both of them radiated a kindness with which I was entirely unfamiliar. I marked my name in the wood-bark of his heart and it remains there still. 

When I lost myself I thought of you. We’d survived everything but now it felt like nothing; we drove to a place where time doesn’t matter, and these were our perfect hours. I was dark and you were light and we were each half-in love with the world around us. We are not allowed to know our fates—but I knew you would be in mine.

the shadows will never find you

Sometimes I think about what it would have been like if we’d known one another as kids, bruise-kneed and bloody-knuckled, lapping at our charred fingers as we held them too close to the fire. The vigor of summer underneath our feet, slanted green light in our eyes; swinging skinny knees over the docks to vanish into the water, slick as eels. And the strangest part of all is that sometimes it does seem real; sometimes it does feel as if I’ve known you all this time, in another place, maybe, another world.

And in that world, maybe none of the bad things would have happened. Maybe I wouldn’t have done things I couldn’t take back. Maybe I wouldn’t have fallen in love with all of the wrong people. Maybe you’d be happier, maybe I’d be less anxious, less wary. Maybe we wouldn’t fly so deliriously high. Maybe we wouldn’t be addicted to the glow of a bottle, that heavy head tilt back when you know you’ve hit the sweet spot, when you know that for that single moment, you’re okay.

You’re gonna be okay.

And – here is where my heart tightens – maybe in another world, you wouldn’t have lost your dad, and I wouldn’t have lost my mom.

Maybe you understand me better than I understand myself; maybe the inverse is also true, and maybe that’s why we speak in code, all the little things we grasp about one another without the benefit of words. Maybe it’s why, to me, you have never been less than beautiful. So many miles between us and absolutely none between our hearts. And god, it’s so fucking cliche, but cliches are cliches for a reason – because at their core there’s often a ring of truth.

There are so many things I want. I want to kiss your cheek and hug you so tight you squeak and try to pull away; I want to bring you to the lakeshore, so we can dip our ankles in the water against the backdrop of the archaic mansions; I want to take you downtown with our stupid hats and our stupid t-shirts, sitting in a dive bar with three hundred pound men and play darts and drinking games until we’re kicked out onto the empty Detroit streets.

All of my greatest love stories have been with the friends I couldn’t bear to leave behind.

In some ways, you are my salvation from the mundane, from the dregs of depression, from the paranoia, from the false promises spoken on honest tongues – “You’ll be okay, I’ll never leave you, you’ll be okay, I don’t care what happens, I will always love you. Always, always, always. You don’t have to be afraid anymore. I am here.”

Because when you say it, I believe it.

I see things in you, beneath that crown of snow-white hair. Your head is bloody but unbowed; your eyes look towards the sky.

It honestly amazes me, how you’re always looking towards the sky.

I don’t ever want you to look down again.

if I can only say one thing,

it will have to be this.

I remember the first day we met; and that’s strange, because I can’t say that about anyone but you. You, with your leg warmers and flats and anxious smile in the middle of math class, turning to slip me a note with your palm faced-down, giant green eyes flashing with mischief, like you wanted so badly to know me — or like you already did.

We aren’t defined by what we keep with us, but by what we leave behind. 

The moon is brilliant on the lake tonight, and the water is like glass, and the wind has an atmospheric chill. Everywhere around me, the world is decaying, but fall to me has always been that season of beginning, of rebirth. And purely by luck (or not), it’s also the season I began to fall in love with you.

‘Fall in love with you.’ Most people don’t understand that, and it frustrates me, because any half-decent friendship is its own kind of love story, its own romance. The initial courting, the exhilaration, the involuntary bursts of laughter, hidden jokes, hidden smiles. I told you everything I’d ever done; you told me everything you’d ever wanted. And, I think, we loved each other all the more — it was that rare kinship, like we’d met elsewhere, in this world or the one before. 

I want to describe our friendship in words, but words can only do so much; they’re the ache, the anticipation, everything around it but the promise itself. 

It’s the air after rain, the stillness after a storm; me, curled up on your bed and you on the floor, coaxing me back into gentleness, reassuring me, yes, it’s okay, you can love who you love, we all love who we love and there’s no shame in it. My heavy eyelids flickering up and my hazel gaze, light and illuminated, catching yours: your friendship purer than what I thought I felt for her, or for him, or for her. We love who we love. Do you know how many times I’ve thought back to those nights sleeping in bed with your cats, watching horror movies until we could sleep no longer?

Maybe you do.

Language is a struggle, something that can’t express all that you hope to convey. They say love is sex, love is lust, but for me — it’s always been my closest friends and me, curled up in bedsheets, shielding ourselves from the oncoming rain. Nothing will ever kill the way I care for you.

The light will rise soon, and everything is coming up green. The world might change, but I can promise you this: nothing between us ever will.

half-empty rooms

I know that I should have told you. But at this point, I also know that it’s too late. Half empty glasses stuck to vinyl countertops, my cheek against faux wood tables in dim diners, hot Michigan summers in no-where land. I close my eyes and I breathe. Bring winter, please. Bring winter before I’ve peeled myself away.

Broken hearts and broken bones hurt just the same. The force on impact would have been beautiful—a split lip, a torn heart. We have all walked this way so many times that it becomes an unbalanced cadence, the song you turn down on the radio because it’s always made you impossibly sad. The familiar ways feel tired, paths worn winding on the inside of my wrist and the road leading from your driveway. You come inside and shake the dirt from your shoes and turn the shower on steaming. You get in and you cry.

Lids are drawn against the night like shuttered windows but even light turns dark. It’s not your responsibility, the fault was all in the design, not the execution—we are meant to hurt one another, it’s why we breathe like we’re breaking. And have you wondered? You won’t ever be good enough. You weren’t made to be.

We’re all sharp edges and jutting hip bones, meant to hurt and not to fit. You won’t be enough until they say you are, and by then it will be too late to matter, just like everything else. And it’s sick, the way I skim around the beating vibrancy of your heart, trying to explain; no, it’s not right that you feel like nothing until they say you are something, but I’ve only ever seen myself through someone else’s eyes. The lies stick to my tongue. I’ve only ever needed me.

It’s quiet now, because silence is what happens when you don’t let people in too close. Until you come near and you say, We dig our own graves. And I say, I know, I know. You taught me how.