IOU (Poetry Preview)

midsummer interlude

The world shifts and skews in my peripheral. A knife breaks through skin — asphalt cracks on the other side, from where the remains of our promise has melted through the gaps, and like snakeskin it starts to peel. A new era. The alternate dimension we've found ourselves in begins to dissolve.

The universe's corners dig into my hip but I ignore the jab. You come back to me with a confession, and I close my eyes to trace the cut that begins with your lips mouthing my name, nails picking and poking through skin to see what's underneath the girl who writes the way she does.

Is she enough to keep me full?

You roll me up, squeeze me down to fit in your mouth, so you can chew away my walls while the world rots under the next apocalypse. Your hands are messy, so you slip and strip me more than you should have, and smoke me out like the countless discarded cigarettes that are left to decay outside your window. You talk to me, honeyed with questions, melting all over the names of those who never gave as much as you.

I crack myself open to let you in, and you throw your pack of cigarettes into the sea in return — promised to try as long as you're next to me. You tell me I'm safe, and I begin to believe you — and the walls feel tighter, lighter. More paper-like. A little bit more sore than the last blow. A blanket instead of a cage. It's starting to grow soggy, from where I sit. From where you left me that night.

My skin turns brittle as I drone along the silence you've began to drape over our conversations — but you tell me to be patient, to wait, to look at you instead of the way my vision has began to crowd from all the times you've made a promise you knew you couldn't keep.

"I'll come back."

Nothing makes sense the day after. When you left me stranded in the middle of the sea and I waited for you there, but you never resurfaced.

The bruise you've left from where you once tried to dig inside of me stains my sheets. A hue that keeps burning through the words I'm trying to write, drowns all the thoughts I'm trying to map under the ghost of your fingers still holding me in place. Keeping my lungs frozen, brain all static, and the lingering echo of your voice that tried to cut me up, telling me you're sorry — an apology lost in the buzz of the phone and the muffled noise of a karaoke session downstairs, the raging of something unexpected just under every exhale. ごめん、本当にごめんなさい — said twice before you drop me back where you found me.

"I'm sorry." Your voice is shaky, heavy with something unknown I can't pinpoint. "I'll come back."

Something unravels. It's too much for your hands to dig into. Too much flesh and bone, too much unsaid expectation you can't live up to. Everything is blurry. The world melts completely.

You come back, a month or so later after the apocalypse has died down and the sea has evaporated, and in its stead are weeds that tell you I've been fine. I'll continue to be fine. You sit on the roof of your car and I look at you from where you've left me the day you apologized. We don't say a thing.

Some endings don't have to be said.

You wave at me from your car.

From the dried up sea, I wave back.

"Midsummer Interlude"

© Rizu Lu
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