The past does not stay where it belongs. The past comes back in shudders and starts, in phantom limbs and ghost memories and night terrors, in tension wound up the spine and through the tendons. The past lives in darkness, in the helplessness of bad dreams, in the buzz saw air of autumn and the lurid dusk of a too-warm summer. The past is morgue and killing floor, butcher shop and final resting place, and I’m gripping these pliers in my hands because at this point I’ve grown so fucking sick of yanking your teeth.
The problem with you is that you wouldn’t recognize love if it stood on your step dressed in geraldine and crimson, trailing seaflowers and sand and shadow. You wouldn’t recognize love if it knocked on your door wearing someone else’s clothes, covered in someone else’s blood, cradling someone else’s knife.
Tired of ravaging myself for you. Tired of swallowing the dull ache of resentment when I see you and your happiness, your domestic bliss, when once it was my hand you held and my cheek you kissed. There’s something the color of rust under my nails and grit on my tongue and I haven’t washed my hair in three days; I imagine you, then, perfectly coiffed, the long light hair to the wings of your shoulders and your white hands, white flowers, white home. Your harp-shaped back through the thin blouses you wear, and the graceful sweep of your freckled arms. You always stood so straight, like Audrey Hepburn, and your smile was Monroe’s.
Sometimes I’ll drink three fingers of whiskey in Grosse Pointe’s humid cage, tip my chin up to the sky and see nothing at all. They say that you can get whatever you want if only you are willing to pay the price, and I paid yours; where, then, is the tollbooth, the easy slip into another road, another life?
“Sorry about this,” I told you, (because this was, of course, the beginning of my incessant apologies to those around me), “Sorry for loving you, God I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’d have loved anyone else. I tried, I tried, I tried, and I wasn’t strong enough.” The boil of tears in my throat. I wasn’t strong enough.
I have dreams like this: a deer hanging from a gambrel, your exhalation like snow in the frigid air, the rifle still loaded by the cabin door. I’m on the table with the knives, and when your small hand lifts one to the moon it fractures the shards of light entirely. Of course I thought I was the hunter, the stalker, vulpine and sharp-toothed and dark. And I thought that right until you drew near with the fixed blade in your small white hand and pressed it to my throat -- how the blood left me first at a stumble and then at a gallop, devil-black and hot as sin. I thought I was the hunter right until the moment you slit my neck. And maybe that’s love, or maybe it’s something like it -- or maybe it’s merely the closest I’ve ever come and ever will.