Tell me what went wrong, what was it you were waiting for?
One more time we sink into the lessons of life and love, those hard earned nuggets of wisdom and the pieces of freedom we fought and bled for. There was no victory like the one we tasted at the end of that day, sitting together in the starlight with our slit wrists oozing salt water together onto the sand. It tasted like tears but it was dry as the powdered sugar we could still feel on the tips of our tongues, chalky and powdery and fake, the sickly sweet saccharine smell of chloroform in our nostrils. You were warm like the token body, simply there, a dead weight in my heart. You hung there as if you were in a hammock stretched leisurely in the trees, swinging gently in the breeze.
There was no defeat like the one I suffered that night, when I felt my past fall away as if it were a thousand pounds of iron. The manacles opened under your touch but still I feel them as if they were as tightly clasped around my wrists as they were on that summer day all those years ago, when a great monster of steel swept my youth and innocence away and replaced it with these chains, cold and red with the color of the rust in my blood. Her scars stretched across her smooth ankles for miles, cut like little smiles in her flesh, smooth as the gash in my knee - a demonstration of the difference between human beings and animals. Steak knives are simply for meat. That day she pulled her pant legs down over her ankles, I was a stranger to her again.
But you hung there in the hammock in my heart. The heartstrings quiver and creak with your unfamiliar weight. I test the supports and sit next to you and we lie there under the night sky and it is infinite. The stars stretch for miles above the red-purple clouds of the light night sky. We can see through them for the first time in years, and for a moment everything is as clear as when at birth our eyes are opened to the world, to the blood and the air and the noise and the white disinfectant expanse of sterility. I choke upon the words I could never say. I spit them out, a hoarse whisper issuing from my lips as the letters thud like lead into the concrete. You picked them up and gave them back, perhaps knowing I could not let them go, perhaps knowing they weren't for you. The address of the recipient is blank, a hastily scribbled mass of white paint covering the ink. We pick at it with our nails until the truth is revealed.
I gasp again for breath. The newborn babe cries as its lungs finally fill with air, and I fall to my knees, 'what have I done, what have I done.' You beg to be let go. I am holding you too tightly. I am hurting you. But it is no worse than I have been hurt. The knives and words and the blood are as fresh in my mind as they have always been, as real and as missing as the pieces of my heart. It was six stitches with a fishhook, they could always sew me back up. But the pieces I lost, they could put them on ice. I remember it was cold. At least, I shivered. I shook like you shook, with nerves and with anticipation. But I shook because it was as dry as the salt on my tongue, as cold as the coins on my eyes. The cross in your hands is no comfort. I can hold one too. I can bear it on my back for miles but I cannot be your savior.
When I broke my heart you broke yours with me. 'It matches,' you said, forcing a smile. But it didn't. Your half was larger, and you tried to cut yours straight down the middle. 'It matches,' you said. We traded. Left for left or right for right, an eye for an eye or a thumb for a thumb. I let you have the bigger half. But it was broken, and you broke yours with me, like your promises and your commitments. How many more would I take my hammer to, how many more would absence sap the warmth from and sharpen to a razor's edge? It's too small to halve again, but I cannot bear to take it back. I must simply give it away. Now I have nothing. 'What have I done, what have I done.' She was innocent, you were innocent, I was innocent. But we changed that. You threw it away in those dark nights. I traded it for wisdom. But she is innocent. It's funny how you used to be too, but only to me. We learned our bitter lessons about life and love, about war and hate and loss and sorrow.
They were our first lessons in irony, as rusted as our blood and as heavy as a square of iron forged in a liquid pool of fire, where the men who tend it and cut the squares free may singe holes in their new blue jeans. So we filled the void left by our happiness with replacements which may or may not be equal or better. You swallowed your medicine, your bitter pills you tried to fix yourself with. I gulped down the feelings, timeless and eternal, hoping to understand. Through it all, we all lay under the same stars, watching the same sky. The sun rose on you and set on me, and in those days you lived in the future and we believed we could grasp the future by the throat and claim it for our own, but it was wild and untameable, and it taught us lessons of its own. So we nursed our wounds and thought about these lessons as well. Life is most painful in reverse.
I held her like I held you in those final moments. We were different people then, always going places and staying in others. I couldn't let go. You had to push me away. We all forced our smiles. Life is better when you smile. But your bloody ghost cuts away my layers until there is only my longing left, and I can't smile with you watching me. I asked you if you remembered those nights together under the sky. The only memories you have now are by proxy. You remembered me. But where were you? Ah, it grows foggy. Above the clouds the stars are always there. But here on the ground it is red and purple and it swirls all around us, laughing and laughing and laughing. It sweeps away our uncertainty and the plans we made and the times we shared and our memories and we are born again, left once again to gasp for breath and let the hot air fill our tiny lungs, choking on our words and sorrows and being crushed by the weight of life and loss and love and the lessons we have to learn, those hard lessons we repeat until we understand.
~Ben
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