IOU (Poetry Preview)

lost at sea

I. Lost at Sea

After he left me to chase after his dream, I painted my walls white. The color of his sweater the last morning I watched his back slowly shrink in my vision. The lightness of the scented letter he had sent in September that arrived at my doorstep in the cusp of June – six months after he bid his last goodbye. The once aging pink walls enveloped the mess he left, a package headed straight to nowhere, for nobody to receive.

It's hard to swallow around the pages I've written about him, to stop myself from tearing down my walls that spoke his name. I covered up the blush of my room to let go of the shadow he forgot to bring with him that day, and sometimes at seven — if I listen closely — I can hear the ocean despite living in a paddy field.

With my eyes closed, it feels as if my house is in the middle of the Pacific, half submerged, still wafting the smell of home baked taiyaki. The same ones that still swim in his apartment's kitchen. In the afternoon, the light bursts through my windows, and the mattress starts to get toasty against my back. Everything tastes rock salty from the baked atmosphere, a warmth I cannot begin to describe. Nothing like the winter when I was tied to him by a plastic string that began to cut with every head that turned.

My room has began to feel like mine again, even though it gets blinding in the mornings. You've always told me four windows in a white room is too much in summer weather. Too much sun in a room that only bounces the light it reflects. Too many coats and buckets for a bland guy who never really understood me at all. Too bright for something that seemed so dim, and yet I still find you sitting on my floor, half folded, basking in the sun that keeps dripping from my windows.

Sea glass, you once said, a rainbow scattered right on your cupid's bow as you angle your head just under the shade. A small piece of glass lost at sea that found its way back to where it's dry, housing a girl that has given up on the world.

"It's not the world you've given up in, though." Your arm is sticky from the heat when you lean in, sure of yourself, and I feel a soft burn churning under the faint hue of my tan. "It's yourself, isn't it?"

In the brightness you look at me. Your eyes melt under the sunlight and it disperses gold all over the walls. In the breeze, behind the dancing chiffon of my curtains, you hold my cheek and tell me to close my eyes and to listen closely instead of my mind that only dreams of the time the refractions were pink instead of white.

You breathe and bring me against your chest, every exhale cloning lost waves finding their way back to a shore. Like that, you draw me in again, despite all the times I've cried, and spilled paint all over my wounds, and told you that I hate him that I could drown.

I start staggering because of reality, right into the ocean you bring with you when you're here. When I look at you, the urge to float as a being that solely exists to sleep under the water swells under my stomach.

The room remains sweltering. We stay still. The taste in my mouth is starting to get salty, and I begin to wonder if you're actually right. If my room is really just sea glass, and we're smaller than anything that can hurt us. If this is okay.

The truth spills out of my mouth in a current, because like a habit, you drift me away on a sailboat. Away from what he left, from his scent still on you, from the stench of the ramen place we used to frequent that he brought you to earlier, from the collection of strings that bind you together, and what's left of the scraps that I refuse to dispose.

I unravel, because right now my house isn't in a rural town, but in the middle of the sea. Where nothing can touch me, see me cry the salt back into the ocean, see me sit next to you as you watch me lose against a small thing that you can crush under your shoes if you wanted to — but always refuse to. Your body feels too close, the equatorial sun nothing compared to your gaze. It's stifling.

The cicadas start to hum and I'm reminded of where we are, who you are, and the way you laugh when I cry. Brighter, in ways I still don't understand. Much more than I can understand. Reality feels mushy under my fingers, brittle around the edges when a smirk snakes on your face, as if you know I'm starting to think about someone else other than where my heart is.

You laugh harder when I raise a finger and press it against your throat. A point, beginning to sharpen. A gap forms and you move away, a tiny bit. A creak. The first drop of a river glitters under the sun that's sleeping on your shoulder.

II. The Sky Chimes A Warning

Sometimes you get carried away by the pseudo endless summer of my town, eyes all honey filtered, and hug my waist to root me up against you. To stop me from running, from breaking my hands from something reckless. To stop the bloody thing from taking over, with too much gut, too much unspoken rage left boiling under my stomach left from something too quick. Too easy. I try to pry you off but you refuse to let me, even when your arms that glue me down are lax with something warm. Something soft that leaves another type of char under the drag of my tongue.

I grow bitter, saltier, and I wonder how the ocean can still chase me here. If it's because of you. You lean down, graze your head on my shoulder. Your hair like thistle, freshly dyed, moving with the breeze, with the waves. The sea you bring along with you begins to swallow me.

I look up at the sky, staring down at us, at the tragedy just waiting to occur, and I'm blinded by blue. The color rings, my head thrums.

I don't understand you. I think I never will.

You hold me there, and the sky saturates until it's the color of Lapis Lazuli. It doesn't look like the sky when I loved him. It doesn't look like the sky when he dragged me to the sea, when he drove me around the city and his hand was in mine — but the color of your shirt. It's so blue, that it feels infinite. I think about why you're here, about the universe, if it coordinates these coincidences to drive me insane. Your grip morphs into an embrace.

I whisper under the breeze. You hear, you always do, because your face is next to mine, a hot weight on my shoulder. It's summer after all.

The sun pierces through a cloud and we're shrouded in yellow. It makes your hair glow over my shoulder, and I begin to think if you're just another exo planet that lost its way into my orbit. Like him. Like the pages rotting away in my shelf that immortalize the broken pieces he took from me, like your name that is beginning to wash his away. Your hands tighten more, and you melt around me in a current, smiling like I'm not burning, drowning in the blue of the sky, of your shirt, and of the sea that you have wrapped around me.

"Lost at Sea"

© Rizu Lu
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