Strangers with Memories

I still remember that summer night, when your gaze felt like Fiendfyre and all that mattered was my face nuzzled against your shoulder, and for a moment it felt like perhaps breathing wasn't so hard after all.

The walls of my apartment still smell like cheap whites- the ones you always had in the left pocket of your black leather jacket. And the entanglement of our limbs and the stench of your cologne still surrounds me in nightmares. Or maybe they are fantasies, I can't quite point out the difference nowadays.

Repugnance seeps into my lungs when I'm alone because what possibly could have been the reason for you to leave me alone at the cabin along the edge of the town, when all that we agreed to were nights of lavender breeze. But then I remember how you brought me daisies when I told you it was my day of sadness. I tried to fathom why you didn't leave when I told you I couldn't give you what you wanted, I couldn't be what you wanted. I couldn't stop my eyes from watering the weeds in my heart; for when you let me lose myself in you on Saturdays because you knew I needed to weep bereft of knowing why, my cognizance got lost too. In the plethora of our morning memoirs, which now houses all sorts of creatures and I can't for the life of me kick them out. Tell me why.

Maybe numbness wasn't so bad after all.

Melancholy hits you in waves. Because explain to me what else can be the reason: why one day, I woke up and just didn't feel like throwing up at the sheer sight of me anymore. At this crumbled piece of muscle and mould that feels like nothing but an alias young girls learn to make out of their souls— to giggle and twirl around until all that is left is a snippet amidst the discarded shell that everyone frowns upon. And when all that is left to do is to sit alone with derelict cuts and gashes, and adorn them with salt-water and alcohol; 

and I think of you.

Try to help me understand if you can, why lately all I have been wanting is to rip the latex I wrote on into pieces- scrub the hands that wrote them raw- and then choke on them until either my lungs collapse or the woman across the street identifies my efforts, comes over and pushes me from my bedroom window.

Maybe it is because I've been visiting strangers' gravestones far too many times to look at my thoughts as anything more than a paste of rags and resin, which somehow slightly resembles the semblance of my mind, which I sometimes wish to swallow full.

I was sitting at the post office yesterday, on the wooden bench outside its back entrance. My wrist scraped on a nail along its seat, and all I could think of as drops of dulcet fluid dribbled from the scratch was how you always traced the veins under that patch of translucent skin with your thumb, whenever I stared a little too long at our hands.

Sometimes I can feel our memories fading, your voice drifting off, the ghost of your lips leaving my lips— my neck, my face, my hands. And I find myself wanting to hide in your arms. But then I realize that I didn't love you, and you didn't love me, and that I don’t know what was, or is, your mother's favourite food; or what was the name you used as a lover. I realize that we were, after all, strangers, and that it shouldn't make sense for my lips to quirk up around the corners every time I see blueberries.

It doesn't make sense for me to remember the poem that you wrote about the girl you loved, and how you used to wander into the woods to pluck yellow flowers because she reminded you of them.

It used to hurt at first. Now I just wonder if what I feel is anywhere near blue to what you did.

It's a kaleidoscope of hatred and disgust, of lust and pity, of bitter words and acid heartbreak, that taste to me of summer.