but sometimes it just seems like the world paused and I'm just sitting there waiting.
Drabble #79 – its skin of gristle (this
isolate)
It’s a strange kind of reverence that comes with downing
the night’s heartbreaks in the eve of winter. The air
cold and dry, I watch you pack your luggage as I unzip mine.
Bite my lip, act like the silence isn’t choking me. Your
suitcase with the broken wheel drags by your side, like a dead
body, heavy with memories and life lost. I toss in a piece of
my heart just before the click of the lock. Do you know what
it’s like, feeling like an echo? You were always the type
who had a lot to say and no one ever knew what was going to
come out of your mouth next. Today, you didn’t say a
word, and I’m astonished by how thoroughly we have broken
each other.
Drabble #77 – Fathoms
Below
I know what it’s like to come home to everything being
scattered and smashed, floor dirty with the heavy, invasive
tread of strangers. It’s like the inside of my own head.
The man who came to see me afterwards mentioned a lot about the
pain, the grief, the wanting to blame someone and rage against
the unfairness of it all. But what the man hadn’t
mentioned was how I suddenly feel like I’m in on the
joke. It’s hard to be the comic relief when no one wants
to laugh at you anymore. And, god, isn’t that some
game-changing irony. But that conversation’s already
spoken for. It’s done, even if no one wants it to be.
They all want to keep bringing it up, want some kind of
conclusion, want everything to be okay, if I can just talk it
out. But we all want a bunch of things we can’t have, and
sometimes being okay isn’t what someone needs. They want
a reason, a perpetrator, a motive, and more often than not you
don’t get that. You just get a broken home; glass to
clean up, furniture to replace, new memories to
make.
Drabble #71 – Plum Tea
A soft, welcome laugh, you brush my hand. The shimmery oil
rubbed into your skin glints in the light, catches the spot
where you touched me. The grasshoppers are a low, distinct hum
that fills the empty spaces lulling between topics. Before I
know it, you are standing to refill a glass I hadn’t
noticed I was drinking. I keep losing pockets of time. You
brush my hand, seated again, and more fractures of light catch
my eye where your fingers are peeking from the folds of your
sleeve. Eyes like gems look back at me, speckled with laughter
and glowing in the mid-summer heat. My breath stutters to a
halt.
Drabble #55 – I'mma give you chills
harmonizing to Otis, Isley, Marvin.
I am stopping to smell the flowers today and you are only ever
kissed by men with shadowed eyes. We do not go to the market on
cloudless days; the citrus is cheaper when it rains. I count
coins, you count street corners, and we wonder how we managed
to get here. I believe we are both slowly growing roots,
despite the fact that nothing, not even our clothes, has ever
fit us quite right. As always, we won’t leave until we
have to, until you fall too quickly and scare yourself out of
the memories you’ve made. It never fails to amaze me how
recklessly naïve you live yet how astoundingly shy you
become when faced with commitment. But that’s okay, I do
not question you. Today we are getting ice cream on the pier
and I know that, for now, this is enough.
Drabble #63 – our lips, darling,
they're so disarming
There are times when you look at me like my body is unlike your
own, like I hold secrets in my chest that you want to discover,
like the color of my eyes is entirely new to you, like my hands
and my arms and my waist are all a thing of beauty and should
be worshipped and studied and appreciated. When you do, my
stomach makes knots and I feel almost ill with it, like
I’ve handed you my insides and asked you to take care of
them. You keep taking my promises, cradling them to your chest,
and I never see them again. You smile, too many teeth, all of
them sharp, and I am not afraid. It should hurt, probably. But
maybe I’m immune.
Your father’s dead, and you’ve always worn glasses that weren’t quite the right prescription. You like the slight blur, the vague fluff surrounding everything hard and straight-edged. I’m not sure there’s a home waiting for me anywhere, and when I was 10 a kid jammed a stick into my moving bike tire and sent me careening over the handle bars. I having stopped falling and crashing head-first since, but maybe you already knew that. Maybe you’d already read the silence between us. Maybe you were eons ahead of me this whole time.
I could sweep your hair behind your ear, and ask what you worried about as a kid, but that’s not important now, is it? I’m starting to understand why we don’t ask questions anymore, now that we have far bigger things to worry about than if the stars are going to be out that night or if we could eat our popsicles faster than they could melt down our fingers. I’ve got a torch to light the skies between us, been holding it this entire time, but when was the last time you needed my help to see in the dark? Maybe you never needed it, and maybe you just kept me around for the company, but I can’t bring myself to leave. Can’t bring myself to sit out here on this hill alone, watching distant torches light the sky and wondering about secrets I never knew.
Drabble #51 – I drink you in (and
breathe you out)
I tugged all of my seams loose waiting. I became desperate. I
dipped my feet in icy water like you used to when it got too
hot. It gave me chills, but not the good kind. I miss when it
was ninety degrees outside and you would still make me shiver.
Like clouds eclipse over the sun in a concaving blue sky, you
always had a way of extinguishing the red in my touch.
Sometimes you don’t know something’s broken until
you touch it, and feel the empty spaces shift around. Sometimes
you don’t know something’s gold until you fit its
mold and come away with marks that shimmer.
