Feb 2017

Emma.

I woke up feeling sad, lonely and missing only one thing. I woke up too many times today, but every time I'd wake up I was here. I was hee-ya.

I awake wanting something from you. But truth is, I just need to know what you felt when our haunt was your kindness, where we dwelt kindly. A land we could actually touch, a place we both called home. How you felt there made me feel I was truly there.

Thoughts of you fluttered in my head. Then I remembered, how could I have possibly forgotten I don't even know, you are more than just in my thoughts and on my mind. When in reality, such as it is, you are stretched across my plane right now.

You are unquieted but not so distant, why? Hovering over me, your disheveled head tilted to one side, my world lurching along with you. The utter black of your hair gently falling down, getting in my eyes. It's getting harder and harder to keep them off my face for long, for your hair are long. Your darkened tresses softly tickling my cheeks like you were a cheerful Melusina. Every inch of you reminding me of rain today. Even though nothing is overcast and you are not casting anything at the moment.

Too much white noise, there's too much white in the background. But when you lean over me, your breath is pink in the morning air. You yawn and it hangs there frozen. Your breath gives away too much and it is the only thing that makes me sad.

You lay there dying, but not budging from your position, even a little bit. Your arms, bare and freshly made of human clay, are pinned to my sides. You aren't moving them, and you wouldn't move either. Next to me, still flattened, your arms are plumb against me, stiffening, straight and unbending. Your hands curled and uncurled in the unkempt, crumbled, cotton bed sheets. Your paint-stained fingers are tapping my pelvic bone. You hold all our cards, even the wild ones, but you are the one quivering inside. There is something quite exerting about using power. Force in something and something else comes out. But what you are doing is so familiar, even if we are in an unfamiliar place, for now. This plane man, it's only a stopover, all the doors are temporary and the walls- the walls are made up of Brillo pads and fog. So keep doing what you are doing. It feels good, you feel so good. Mostly because you are good. We don't have enough of that in this world.

I only have a slight inkling of your true nature, your calling is your own, but why were you named Mǣhvish when this world was first born, though no window was cut for you. Still a secret, still not warm, how is that not temporary. Then there is that, it can be as temporary as that wasn't permanent. Although you insisted upon calling yourself Khælil like you were saying okay, over and over again. You thought the pheromone cult was yours to control. It is not. It's driving me a bit mad, just make up your mind, just make up your name already. It's not that hard, you've done it before. You don't have to put your name into anything. You can finally let it be temporary.

Moving above me, you burped in my face. It's a fresh day but you won't let go of the sunlight you caught last night. You gnash your teeth, keep gnawing at the hidden sunlight that's no longer hiding. I can't tell if it's your litany or an incantation; but you are muttering about all the swallows returning to Capistrano safely. Like you are the one who took them there.

You know what I really like about you. How you said, does there have to be a trade-off? That's the beauty of it. There doesn't have to be, but there must be. A page for your everything. I want to do everything I write about with you. Only, I have to become a writer and you have to stop being real.

But you can't stop being real, can you and I want to move now. I would like to go. So I evict myself from your environs. Okay, that sounded stupid. I did try though. Pulling myself out of you, I tried moving out from under you. I gave it a shot. You object prettily but your objection is not pretty. But then you shove me back, slamming down hard on me. You claim all of me, usurping something from me. You squeeze too tight, you did, and vermilion colors explode in my head. Making me vanish inside you once more, and here we thought you were the ghost.

Some people are ghosts even when they are alive. You are not alive but I am your Ghost, yeah that makes sense. This is what makes this a horror story. And my dream of ebbing away from you and all this remains a dream. And for what? What do you care? You are aphid and free. I am the one who needs this loss.

Your temple and your chest feel so lonely even to me, though your weight is interesting enough to keep me here, at least stop me from getting up and throwing you off me. Your body has fogged up our entire room and the rind of your skin misting over, making everything seem so hazy.

Nauseated, the sun became silent at that, already missing the midnight. So you wouldn't look at it. Aghast, you didn't.

Then you fling over one arm, trying to swing your entire mass away from me, your elbow barely misses hitting my nose. Your fingers already a myth stretching out, trying to grapple something else that's not there.

You grab the air like it's tangible and flip to a scenario more to your liking. You sure don't want to mess up the morning tea. You demand it with your honeyed beer, the taste of lemons already sweetening your sour mouth at the thought of it.

You change the setting because the song had turned savage. You switch this scene because you were exhilarated and scared at the same time. Though you forget you are the one who's chilling and hypnotic, not the song which is about a beautiful war. It's so maddening that you think to love is to die. You have already built this up too much inside of you.

So this is your retake.

Dawn found her vulnerable. Sunlight a hungry wolf that fell on her, its gentle bites reviving her. Making her stir beside him; squirming within the tangled limbs. Her phantom self stretched across his torso. He moved to stifle her unbidden yawn with a kiss; unwashed breath and all. Still entwined in the warm sheets of their yesterday swevens, rusty with their elated fatigue their cold shadows mingling without restraint; her breath still had that wet smokey taste of all her wars, the ones she had been fighting for him in her fever dreams, and he drank in deep, quenching a quaint restlessness inside of her.

Meh. I think it's clunky but rainchecks must be cashed, no. You did what you must, but they lied to our face, what can you do. You have ceaselessly changed your face through the ages, you have, your name doesn't have a face anymore. You can excuse that war but how can you excuse this?

I woke up feeling the full weight of your no. That's more than you, is what's weighing me. down. How many times does the moon say no before the forest refuses to open up? I can't turn anymore nor turn back to you.

You cannot stand still in time, don't you know. You mustn't stand so alone in yesterday. Wavering and swaying in swards of memories. What a way to deny yourself. What is so heartening about that. That is simply no way to live. What kind of life is that. The only way to breathe is to move forward.

But what do you see before you move? You must live for the future. But what do you do when the future is past. Gone. New is never. Never is now.

I am still numb under you, the stars on your body weigh too much.

She is fading, but we are staying still.

What am I even dreaming of? I wake up and I am still in it. That's worse than any nightmare. If there is any consolation, it is this.

In the dead center of the lyrical divide, that's where we'll meet. You and I.

And all the monsters we'll make together, they'll get to keep us. Even when those monsters were the very secrets we were keeping from them.

It took me forever to write that. I liked that forever, but I didn't want to write this. I dreamt of you and that was the only way to get you out of my head. This was the only surefire way of stopping you from following me into my dreams. When the truth is, we have both been dreaming of me.

But it is vital to remember.

There are no real monsters here. Only the ones we make.

And we will make them.

And make them we will.