(no subject)
Coma
I am trying to make sense of the moment when you left me, all these years later, from a place where I can see that you too have been left, that the scars I suffer are reversible. I am trying to understand what it means to make decisions for and against, to cut a life for myself out of the rock wall of reality, to grow wiser through the violence of everyday choices. I am trying to imagine what it was like to be you, cold and alone in your inner space, your marvellous mind spinning in a silence beyond my ability to sever. It is 11pm on the evening of your death, it is twenty years after, and still I can’t bring myself to lament your loss, to séance the ghosts we once called memories, to lay claim to our constellations. We lived our lives together in a manic mutual orbit, spinning faster but never closer; we were as equal and opposite as the earth’s magnetic poles. Each intimacy of ours was dreamlike and distant; our love was a sleep as deep and as deadly as the one you became lost in before me. I lay beside you on the last night, took your treasured hand in mine and asked you to come back, to forsake the ineffabilities of heaven, to awaken to a new life here with me, to open your eyes to a circadian radiance that would bathe both our bodies in light. My sleeping beauty, my fallen prince, I wanted to cry, can we ever mend our mistakes without the apologies we thought so trite, the stale sorrys that told us we were free to be each others’ all over again? Will we ever get the chance to find the words that will fail us, to revel in the endearments that can never encapsulate our love? I slept with these thoughts on my mind, heavy and light as our history of kisses, and dreamt of better places, of all things arranged in their own euphoric order, of all desires granted and of justice fully met. But unlike you, I woke; I woke to the feeling of your fled warmth, to your eyes all closed and permanent. And so now I am trying to make sense of the moment when you left me, I am trying to decide if I ever really understood it. I am trying not to forget that first instant without you, how the light in the room was fluorescent and stark, how the pain was fresh and original. I am trying to convince myself we dreamt the same dream that final night, that our heads were so close on the pillow a revelation leapt between us, that we shared one last goodbye. I am trying to believe there is enough of you in me to last me the rest of my life and that there was enough of me in you to console you at the end of yours. I am trying to grieve myself better, I am trying to tear myself free. I am trying to never leave you.