along the road

untitled | 2016 | age 17

              The Uber driver speaks in colours I can't understand.

                   Words. I correct myself. We speak in words, here.

         I nod, telling him left, while the wrong turns tug at my heart. The wrong things pour from my fingers and onto the screen, the wrong boy on the other side of everything I have failed at and with and this, this is another thing to tack onto that lengthening list.

                 A tendril of emerald flows from the driver's mouth, and my head creaks up and down, the car humming around us. That sound loudens, increases in depth and width and pitch, engulfing my soul and shaking everything I own, letting it quake and break and stake everything I am.

                       I want to scream—tell him to stop, to leave me on the side of the road (it's close enough, I can walk home, I can let the cold tingle my skin). I need to let a sound leave me, one that I cannot forge with doors on either side of me and a stranger's heartbeat throbbing across from me.

                        The headlights beam onto the gate of the complex. I whimper; I have returned to the place where I simply live. I am crammed back into the box I have learned to love, but now linger in loathing—for the scratchy walls, the paste-on countertop that feels fraudulent beneath my fingertips, the noise that cuts through the air into the silence of the night.

                 My heart cannot be caged. And yet, I can. This body, this skin, these veined eyes and sinking cheeks and weak bones are imprisoned by everything I have painted onto them. The gold, however, has chipped away. That is my doing; not his.

                      A rainbow pricks my eyes, and I blink, nodding, returning the spectrum of colours, allowing his pleasantries to bounce off of me and land in his vicinity—in his hands or on his head or against his shoulder—weakly, dimly, feebly.

             Chills snake up and down my skeleton. I step through the opening gate, the clangs and rolls and whirrs calling me home.

                     He asks what I'm doing. I tell him everything—except that I'm dying.

            When we begin to speak (like real people do), I find myself biting back a smile. That is, until, my lips bleed onto my chin, my fingers, the screen, your murderous words.

                             I don't feel that way about you.

           He tells me that he's sorry, but I know there's nothing he can do.

                He tells me that I'm hurt; I tell you that it's true.

         He says he want our lips to meet like old friends, lovers that tumbled to an end, a husband coming home to his wife, love finally meeting life. I tell him that I'd like that. You never say another word.

                       Because, dear, when the sun rises and it burns your skin and pricks at your sight and bathes you in shining, glimmering, golden light, you stand and walk and talk and land there for the world to see. Once the moon caresses the cold glass of your window, there's nobody there—just you, and me, and the heart that I have ripped out of my chest.

                             You are a boy who lives in the dark, I am the man who craves sunlight; truth, honesty, clarity. You and I were not birthed from the same star, the same skin, the same ideals. You believe in being polite only when necessary; I believe in letting your love soar across the sky.

                You believe in hidden things; I never enjoyed dark spaces and closed doors.

                    There. I whisper to the night, the dying thing throbbing weakly in my bloodied, still hands. You have no hold on me anymore.

               In the midst of the confusion, the chaos, I make myself tea. I hum a song that I can't remember the words to. I sip it, cautiously, lovingly, until sleep calls for me.

                             My head rests against the pillow, and for the first time, I don't feel like something's been taken from me. Instead, a lightness coats my soul, reminding me of days when cares were few and joys were many, when warmth was constantly available, where my mother sang my child-like soul to sleep.

               There is peace. That is all I can say; there is peace.

☀

                         I still feel the ghost of you inside me; sloshing around my heart like warm water, shaking behind my bones like the cold air, bleeding through me like a disease—a parasite. A guest who has overstayed his welcome, a friend who fades into a flickering shadow.

                 You are the cold I can't shake. You are the hand that hurts to hold; the house with lights shimmering in the darkness, the almost love of my wavering life. You were what I hoped for.

                            Some slower, more jagged shards of me wish I could live under these false pretences, holding this dead hope. I long for a time when I can live without you; I weep for the day when the sun rises, and your name isn't whispered into my ear by the early morning, isn't hummed in the air when I turn on the radio.

                   When that morning comes, I hope you never know.

☀

We're almost at the end. Wow.

I love you.

—jay.