wisps for the winter

it’s looking cold more than it’s feeling cold, these days. forget free-form writing, forget talking and thinking, all i have is moving with your eyes closed and tearing things open with your teeth.

and the flashbacks, i guess, but that’s a whole other thing.

it was fun though, wasn’t it?

yes. it was.

you know i do i miss you. i think of you sometimes.

think bigger.

the best parts of every day are being under the water and unconscious among the feathers, smooth-stepping out of automatic and into something a little more comfortable. i’m eight and seventeen and twenty six all at the same time, the millions of us sitting like stars around the table, each one light years away from the others but just as full of hope and promise. even twenty seven.

i’ve been wanting to break this streak for a while.

you can’t. we promised.

he’s dead. he will always be dead to you.

sometimes i forget what i was going to talk about. but i remember now, and it only took a minute of staring at the sunny window without seeing a thing. this, like the ice sculpture you put in my mind, beautiful and ephemeral, is temporary. it’s september and the light is fading faster than the ones behind my eyes. ice can thrive in cold places, you know. strong and cold and fragile and neverlasting.

for what it’s worth, i have the rock of life that we washed in the water near your house that day right here again, next to my bed. there’s so little that i remember of you and so much i still think we could have got through. i hope things are okay out there. i hope you don’t miss it too much. i still miss you, though. for what it’s worth.

the dead among us lie around me like shadows, from him to him to her and all the multitudes in between, from the ones i knew best to the ones i barely knew at all. some of them still move from time to time. one of them always shows up just before all the glass in my room shatters and one twitches every time i see a motorbike. still there, every cold body. frozen like the winter. i don’t want them to leave.

talk to me.

i always do.

not like we usually do. tell me something poetic, something that i can put in a song. i want them to remember that i had something.

you still have something. to me, you’ll always have something.

you’re just saying that because you live here. and i love you for it.

i know i want more than you can give me. i know i want more than anyone in the world could ever give me, presence and absence and seraphim all in one piece. and i know that the bodies will haunt me, and the movement through the seasons still teases me. a piece of peace could never be as good as peace in pieces.

and whatever it was, just know that i will never say it out loud.

[Image: trees. Source: Dani Relbyn. Used with permission.]