I let you dig beneath my skin with switchblade nails and a certain disdain for the rules. Duped into a false sedation by your anaesthetic lips, I felt no pain at all and was quite content for you to build a catacomb in my bones. Over time it became a grandiose tomb, with chandeliers that cast rippling ribbons of light colliding and cascading off every surface. The least it meant was I was never alone and I appreciated that modicum of comfort.
Most days you made sure to lay fresh flowers at the headstones of past loves that you’d raised to keep my memories from clouding over in a wash of static. Mine’s a mind for numbers, and I hate myself for that. It means I will forget your face one day...but at least I won’t forget your feel, a bruised glow emanating from my fleshy marrow, the air moving over a dead butterfly’s wing, an aching emptiness you so longed to fill. Forget CERN, the black hole in me is beyond infinite and I haven’t managed to suck in anyone yet, let alone whole countries.
Switzerland is safe...for now.
By February you’d burned into my synapses so that one day you tapped into my veins and I didn’t even realise. It felt good to see the blood flow through you and me become one and the same. A shared cobalt highway, ours and ours alone, like staples holding us together because we couldn’t by our own hand. We were a symbiosis based on want, not need.
I shied away from the future as much as possible, tried to make the moment last as long as I could. The apocalypse came and went, but lost inside your lips I didn’t notice. Ash removed all the competition yet I knew eventually you’d get bored and I guess I was just glad that when the time came you had the courage to say that you’d rather have nothing than have me.
When you left there was no funeral, no headstone to mark the date, just a blurring of once crystal images into one medium-sized cardboard box. The other graves cracked and toppled, becoming hollow majesty mirrored dully in the sands of time; a grandeur greyed and faded to a monochrome masterpiece weeping silently under a stolen moon. They were pretty in a gothic way, constant reminders of my own fallibility.
Now my eyelids bat away the past and I can do nothing to stop them. I promised myself there’d be no regret but now it’s all I can do to cling on to it. Our parade is now a rusty swing-set, nailed to the floorboards of an empty galaxy. My galaxy. All mine.
If only I were a phoenix and could cry life back into this fragile state of mind. If the worst came to it, I could just set myself on fire.
But for now I am a ghost frozen in a shard of glass.
Adding your comment:
