26
diary chapter
Ten years ago I lost you, or we lost one another. We knew we became strangers, though I was convinced I was still that thirteen-year-old rawness that had split.
Show me your breasts again, confide in me. May that child touch base. May that child pull to the front of my brain, remember.
Are you sick? Are you dead? How’s your mum? I miss her most.
Our volta was slow and red as honey. We must’ve both felt it. Infiltrating and pinching our nerves, spears of prickles of dancing blood.
Trying to inhabit one another.
And sometimes I feel like you did replace me, but so did I, such a stretch, a hopscotch from one self to another.
I’d want you to know that.
Sick things happened to you as a kid, so I held my hands to your wounds.
Is that too religious?
What does a deity have to say for the sad sacks of We.
I wish you no ill. I don’t know if you’re still there.
You were so, so scared. I held my hands to your hands, led the way in our friendship.
Friendship—we were in love.
Love—the kind that makes your chest fill. The kind that makes your insides ache with the intrusion.
The kind that gets me in trouble, multiple ways.
For better or worse! For either or! I have no eyes on you. I do not know how you are.
And each remembrance tugs misremembrance. Callie the calico? Geo the budgie? Horses your mum didn’t want to sell, animals you couldn’t afford to feed?
You were so tiny, fit in my palm.
I felt so tiny. In the end, I begged. It was an unhappy sight.
And when I rode on the train through the English countryside not knowing where I was or where you were, the green smearing the windows like pastels, I thought of you. I think of you. In my head, you’ve got red hair, and your ribs show, and you’re handsome and beautiful. I miss the you I knew. The me that left misses the you who’s gone.
I’m split green and sappy like a tree, living in all spaces. You are too. I’ll lament, I’ll always lament.
It’s like this: could I try again?
It’s like this: would I try again?
I have respect for myselves and yourselves. Baby powder and power outages and hay, always hay.
Ten years. We’ve both died many times over. I ache to take you from your martyrdom, bathe you anew, meet you again.
Between the rocks, meet you again.
LITTÉRATURE !!!