(no subject)

[life_giver]

[ How I'm feeling|
Melancholy]
[ What I'm listening to| Mogwai - Take me somewhere nice & Snow Patrol - Run

Title: Leave me
Pairings: Aoi/Uruha
Warnings: None.
Rating: R
Summary: I relive you with each touch of a hand to my neck, or the smell of fresh linens and sea spray.



"I went into the desert to forget about you. But the sand was the color of your hair. The desert sky was the color of your eyes. There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you."- Jeffrey Eugenides

I still remember you as you were that day, windswept and bleary eyed, and perfect. If there is one image I kept with me after your footsteps in the sand led away from me all those years ago, it is that one moment that you smiled at me through the tears you couldn't hold back though you tried so hard. You smiled to keep from breaking down completely, but you gave me a small gift with that smile, a pinpoint of strength to build on as you turned away from me.

I keep that image pressed to the deepest folds of my heart. I keep it there under lock and key and I go on with this half-life; the parties, our friends, the starting over and new beginnings. So many new beginnings stretch out in front of me for miles. I line them up like soldiers at their own execution. Once one new beginning ends, another begins again, and again, and once more again, until I'm wondering when they will give up on me and leave me in peace. They should know by now that I'm hopeless. You were the only beginning I ever wanted, but you became the ending that I can't escape.

I relive you with each touch of a hand to my neck, or the smell of fresh linens and sea spray. When it rains, I see the twirling material of your red coat in the watery pavement, remembering how you loved to dance beneath the streetlights while pulling on my hands until I relented and melded with you as easily as ocean waves to a shoreline. You had always been my shoreline, the only one I could truly come home to. Midnight was your hour, your lonely hour as you told me once. But for me, it was when you became most alive. I've tucked away mischievous and even sensuous memories of phone calls in the dead of night, of your face peering back at me through mussed strands of golden hair on the other side of my opened door.

Every time I wake up at midnight gasping from another dream of you, my back is hitting the wall as it did so many times at this hour, your hands hungry and fumbling with my shirt until you rip it out of impatience. You were never patient when it came to me. Adoring, passionate, generous to a fault, but never patient. The sound of someone drumming their fingers on a table brings me back to you and there you sit in front of me, chin resting in one hand while your fingers drum a bored, impatient solo on the table. You huff and call my name in that way that always had me on my knees in front of you. I would have done anything for you,anything, but call my name in that breathless whisper and you have me body and soul.

Nothing was ever enough for you. You were always on an adventure for more, more than I could ever give you. I stumbled to keep up with you, holding your hand tightly as you pulled me through the crowds at the amusement park or pushed me laughing and gasping into the city river. I see you on the banks, hands on hips in that familiar, haughty stance and your laughter soothes all worries or annoyance.

If I open a bottle of wine, your face is reflected back to me across the table, flickering in the candlelight, your dark brown eyes drinking in the light and I'm sucked in as well. I drown in them willingly. I drink the sensual curve of your lips as you smile at me, beckoning from too far away. You lean across the table and purse your lips to blow out the candle between us. Red stains the table as the wine bottle is neglected for needy bodies and desperate hands.

"Love me." Your breath against my ear sends warm fingers down my back and I wake up to cold sheets and an empty bed. A wine bottle stands alone on the table across the room, the candle overturned and dried up as it was the night we left it there for more interesting things.

I never imagined you would become a memory, that those moments between us would follow at my heels this way. When I met you, I never would have thought your ghost would haunt the corners of my bedroom, the shops down my road.....the friends I once called my own. But then who imagines the end when they meet the perfect beginning, the one with the face of an angel and a smile that makes everything alright? Crumbling walls and suicidal goodbyes are the farthest thing from a person's mind with lips the taste of cherries against their mouth, and the beginnings of a storm in their chest. No one can predict the future of 'forever'.

Sometimes I can't stand to listen to music anymore, especially the sound of acoustic guitar. I've all but given it up. I've packed away my own guitars in a closet where they gather another layer of dust each passing year. From time to time I open the closet and peer inside. Maybe to see if you've left me yet, but still you sit there on the floor, cross legged, my guitar in your lap and you hum the song your fingers pull from the strings so perfectly. I listen until the need for your hands becomes too much and I take them from the strings and place them on my chest. My guitar is forgotten as it slides from your lap and you push me down to the floor beneath you and mouths and hands resume the battle we've become so familiar with in the deep recesses of night and the heat of the day.

"I like to listen to the beat of your heart. What if I could match my heartbeat to yours?" Your voice escapes the closet before I can shut you out and close the door. Our soft laughter follows me into the kitchen where I intend to drown myself in strong coffee to chase away the morning chill. Your cold fingers around my waist remind me of the way I once warmed myself on mornings like this. I never needed scalding black coffee when I had you on my kitchen counter keeping me hostage between warm, smooth thighs and damp kisses.

Sometimes I wish I could escape your ghost, but at other times, I feel a ghost myself.....and ghosts....they keep one another company. They're old friends in chains together. You sleep beside me on hot nights. I feel your body press against my back, warm and damp and naked as the breeze filters in through my window, mixing the scent of the sweltering city with cooling sex. You curl around me as you trail melting ice cubes down my chest and the front of my stomach. I can feel you grin against my back when an ice cube circles a nipple and I jump at the icy touch. The sounds of cars and the shouts from our neighbors below are the only conversation allowed in this room on nights like this. I stare out of the open window as the street sign flashes on the floor of the bedroom and I try to recall the pattern of your breathing as you fell asleep against me, ice melting between your hand and my hip.

When I can't resurrect the sound of your breath against my neck, I climb out of bed and go stumbling to the bathroom. I don't understand why I do this to myself, why I live in this altered reality of past and present, and what would have been our future....had you kept your promise to me. I splash water on my face and watch the water swirl down into the drain, wondering idly if it would be better if your memories slipped down the drain as well. But then who would be there to remind me that you existed in the sphere of my world once if you weren't there to torture me?

I lean heavily against the sink, exhausted from another sleepless night and brave a look at myself in the mirror. What I see is me.....but only a shadow of me. The me that you once knew, the one that bought you flowers until your entire apartment was filled and you couldn't stop sneezing for weeks didn't have these dark circles under his eyes. The me that pestered you for months until you decided to go out on a date with me was never so drawn and exhausted looking as the man staring back at me from the mirror. The me that made you laugh until tears were running down your pretty cheeks was never bent over as if the weight of the world rested on my shoulders. I carry more than the world now, I carry handfuls of broken memories, shards of hope that cut to the bone, fragments of your smile, and I carry them all because I'm too afraid of letting them go. To let these fragments go means to erase your existence and I've never been ready for that. I'm too in love with my past to let you go completely.

"Take me with you."

You raise a hand and beckon to me from the bathtub. I watch you through the mirror as you cup handfuls of water and pour it over your face and hair. I can feel the naked press of your wet body against me as you lean back against my chest and pour another handful of water down my neck. I tilt my head back against the rim of the bathtub and allow you to press your mouth to the hollow of my throat. You always had a fascination with my heartbeat. Your lips and ears and fingers would always find it and you would try so hard to match your heartbeat to mine. I still don't know if you ever succeeded. You were convinced that you had. Your hair falls down my chest in wet rivulets, dark blond to the paleness of my skin. I wanted you to grow your hair out and you did it for me with the excuse that when I wound my hand around your hair in bed and pulled, you trembled against me and you thought you died in those moments of ecstasy and I was the only thing grounding you. Long hair was good for that sort of thing. I allowed myself to believe in that.

"I need you more than I've ever needed anyone and that scares me," You murmur into the skin of my neck. It scares me as well. It still terrifies the hell out of me, this want for something dead. I never stopped needing you, even if you stopped needing me. I'm trapped somewhere in the thorns of your chest.

I walk down the street and think I see you sometimes, peering around the corner of a building. The sign that swings above the building in the gusts of wind reads "The book stand". I hurry to catch up to you and you duck inside the building laughing, wanting me to chase you......needing me to find you. I look around the long rows of books and empty isles until I find you leaning against a shelf, nose buried deep into a book, a familiar sight. I was forever bringing home bound tomes and small pocket books wrapped in tissue paper and twine for you, treasures I had picked up in second hand shops and found in deserted bookstores like the one we are in now. You liked to study things you didn't understand; foreign lands, and strange customs, and odd stories. I think you liked it as much as creating songs. As long as you were creating something, learning something new, you were happy. You look up at me from the book and snap it shut in my face.

"I guess you caught me." Hands pull me further into the dark sea of books around us and I'm lost not in the darkness, but in you. I never really did catch you, did I? I was forever chasing, grasping at empty space as you turned away from me laughing. I only had you in moments, in slivered fragments, and then you were gone......somewhere I couldn't follow you any longer.

I don't like the smell of autumn. I once liked it, before you. It was my favorite season at one time. I loved to sit in the park and watch the turning leaves; red, green, gold, pulled from the trees, buoyed by the wind until they landed in little drifts around my feet. The smell of autumn is something one never forgets. It's the smell of fire and smoke on the wind, gold and deep and calm. It's the resting period before the freeze. Spring has already gone into hiding so that autumn can blow it's way in slowly and hold us until the cold beauty of winter decides to seep the ground in ice. Autumn is the last color we see before the harsh white.

You were the first thing I saw that autumn day so many years ago. You were doing what I'd done so many times, sweeping up handfuls of colored leaves from the ground and then letting them drift down around you on the wind. It was almost childish, the amusement you got from standing in the drifting leaves. The wind whipped your hair across your face and played with the ends of your scarf and that red coat.....the one you walked away in the last day of our lives. I remember thinking you were the most beautiful thing in the park that day and if I didn't talk to you I'd be kicking myself for weeks afterwards.

If I hadn't gone up to you and you hadn't smiled at me, would I have gone on way, my future a little less exciting and meaningful, but still content? Would I have met another you on some other road, in some other park, one that was perfectly happy to stay with my flaws and shortcomings? Or would I have walked past you, and kept walking as I had all of my life, ignorantly content in my own way, but dead inside....devoid of the emotions you awoke inside of me the day you first smiled at me? To be dead inside is a strange feeling.....it's the feeling of nothing if you can comprehend that.

You don't realize you feel nothing until you suddenly feeling something. Usually it's your first loss or your first love, but always....the first person you love brings about the emotions you remember the most, the ones you relive time and again because you're afraid of them dieing or you're afraid of feeling that way again, because you know it's a needle in the chest that you just can't pull out. I'm afraid of never feeling the way I felt about you ever again.

It's the first hard push that leaves you breathless that you cling to forever, even if it's buried somewhere deep and dark and nearly lost, but not quite forgotten. You never feel as alive and as invincible than you do in the throes of first passion. You never feel as completely and as madly or deeply as you do for the first person that awakens emotions inside of you. The world has always worked that way. It throws you curve balls and you either hit them or you get hit by them and more often than not, we're bruised to the bone by that first hit and some of us....well some of us can never recover. Home runs are few and far between. I learned this lesson the hard way.

I barely ever remember the bad times or hear the echoes of harsh voices, but when they come....they blow in on the winds of a storm that leaves me broken and drained. Instead of the arguments, my conscious chooses to wallow in your light, in your kisses to my face and your laughter against my chest. I close my ears to your screaming and the sound of glass breaking against the wall behind me. It's funny the way we try to erase the bad parts of life and live only in the good. But with the good always comes the bad, what matters is how bad the dark parts of those memories are.

To me.....we were merely two people deeply in love and lust with one another. We fought, we broke wine glasses against the wall and then swept aside the broken shards to make love on the floor, gasping out our apologies into necks and against lips and our memories, convenient things that they are, would wash themselves clean in the morning and we would hang them out to dry until the next brawl. We loved and we fought, and then we loved even harder.

I see you on the couch in my living room, head buried in arms that shiver with the force of your tears....tears that I pulled from you with greedy, selfish hands. I never meant to hurt you, but I still seemed to find ways to trip and go crashing headfirst into a mess I could only clean up as clumsily as my heart allowed me to. I was too deep into you.....we were entwined too tightly so that eventually....we suffocated the life from one another.

"I'm so afraid of losing you to this," You whisper from the darkness of the living room and I lean my head against the door-frame, squeezing my eyes closed, wishing away this particular memory. But still your voice reaches me with desperate fingers. I can't stop your hurting and it kills me, over and over again....each time you play back this memory for me. Kill me if it would make you feel better, I hold out my wrists to you. You've always had the power to do what you will to me because I have always been yours. Now your memories own me but at least it is some flimsy remnant of you.

"Tell me it'll be alright, that everything is okay," You plead through tears I can't understand, don't want to understand. I whisper to you that everything is okay, that I love you still, that I'll always love you, and that seems to satisfy your ghost. I wave you away and breathe easier when the heavy, damp feeling of that memory clears from the room. I lay down beside you on the floor and rest my chin on my crossed arms, content instead to watch you writing, lost in your own world of lyrics and poetry. I had always preferred you this way, lost in thought and more content than I could make you on my own.

"Give me a beat," You demand with all the authority of the queen of England. You push the glasses you hate so much further up on the bridge of your perfect nose as they slip down for the millionth time that day. I reach out and adjust them for you. Your eyesight was horrendous, but those glasses.....they had always secretly made me happy. They gave you an air of intellect that most people assumed didn't go with that flawless face of yours. Those people didn't know you the way I did. I knew the complicated maze of your mind like the life lines in the palm of my hand. It is a maze I could have spent a lifetime finding my way through.

I laugh and slip the pencil from behind your ear to tap you out a beat on the floor to go with the lyrics you've penned to paper. Your face pinches in concentration and I reach up to touch you, to run my fingers down your cheek to your rounded chin and then over your full lips. Your lips remind me of a cupid's bow from a Greek painting, full and frozen in an endless pout. You kiss my thumb and that is the end of lyrics and beats.

One would think there would be anger, earth shattering fury at having been left alone, and maybe there had been in a static moment after you had gone. But in it's place was left a dull pounding, an ache that has never really left me. It resides somewhere in the chest and as if to remind me I'm not dead yet, it pulses from time to time; when your song comes on or when someone laughs the way you did....that laugh that came from deep within you. I see you with your head thrown back, the long line of your neck bared, and I laugh with you. It was always that way. Your laughter was contagious, you were contagious. You ran rampant through my veins and made a home there, and even now you still flow like blood through my body.

For months after you had gone, after your scent was washed from my bedsheets, and your fingerprints were wiped clean of the mirror in the bathroom and the kitchen countertop, an unwanted crime scene, I still looked for you in everything. I would stop in scrubbing the bathtub when I found a blond string of hair, a rebel that had escaped me, and I would see you leaning back against the porcelain, looking at me from beneath hooded eyes for the briefest of moments before I washed you away. Every phone call was you on the other end, calling to tell me that we had made a mistake, that you hadn't meant to walk away, that I should have stopped you. Instead, I've stopped expecting you to call. I know when I look out the window, you won't be there waiting for me on the sidewalk, needing me the way I still need you. And yet, you keep me in limbo still. I am a still-frame through and through.

"Have you heard what Uruha's doing these days, Aoi?" A friend asks me over coffee one morning as he stirs heaps of sugar into his mug. You grab my hand from across the table for a split moment. Your coffee is steeped in sugar and milk until it isn't coffee at all anymore but is more a sugary milk drink. You give me a sip and I grimace at the sweet taste and ruffle your hair. I always liked mussing your perfect hair, that blond halo that was sometimes such a lie. Your cheeks are beautifully flushed as you grin at me.

"Aoi? Did you hear me? Someone saw Uruha the other day.....did you know-" The scraping of my chair against the hard linoleum floor is eardrum splitting, chalkboard grinding loud.

Now I remember why I don't hang out with our friends anymore, why their invitations for coffee or dinner are always ignored, left to the wayside, or thrown in the trash. I don't want to know.....I'm content with your memory. I don't know the you that you are without me these days. If we were to meet today, we would be strangers. My heart would know you, would search for any trace of familiarity and grasp onto it, but we would merely smile at one another and kill each other slowly with the small talk we had always hated. Tell me something meaningful, whisper that you love me still. Don't look at me with gaurded eyes and hesitant touch as if we're meeting for the first time. It is for this reason, I wouldn't want to meet you on some crowded street corner or run into you in one of our old haunts.

People can be cruel creatures without meaning to be. It's been years they say, haven't you gotten over that yet? As if you are only that and hadn't shared an enormous part of my life with me. As if we hadn't been connected at the hip, rarely ever seen apart.

Your toothbrush sat beside mine in my bathroom on the sink, your shoes thrown haphazardly against my own in the closet. Hell....you had your own coffee cup in my cabinet and that dent on the right end of the couch? That was your spot. I spent many nights creeping into the living room to cover you with the blanket from my bed after you had fallen asleep in that spot, watching your late night tv shows or playing those ridiculous video games. If there was room on the other end of the couch, I would slip in beside you and our feet would touch one another and our legs would twine like vines. There was nothing like the feeling of the person I cared about above all things twining their legs with my own in bed, or on the couch. It spoke of safety....and comfort like I had never felt before. It was home to me.

"He had a fucking house plant on my balcony," I realize I've yelled this out loud in the crowded coffee shop before I can stop myself and suddenly all I can hear is a static buzzing all around me. I don't stay around to listen to our friend try to explain himself or apologize and I offer no apologies in return. I was never very good at saying I was sorry was I? I leave to a sea of staring and scandalous whispering, to strangers that shake their heads and wonder how I've fallen so far.

Sometimes I think it would be easier to feel nothing at all. But then I see you smiling at me from across a crowded room and the yearning I feel for you blots out any other feeling I could ever possibly feel and it's like a narcotic....this addiction to you.....this want for you. One hit and I need more, just one more hit, one more taste, and one more turns into another and another until I'm lying dazed and drugged in this bed with you on my skin.

That was how it always was with you. You left me desperate for more, and when you were gone, I didn't know what to do with myself, couldn't comprehend wanting something I could never have again. I drag a nail across the skin of my arm as I sit at the window, looking down into the street below, at the people milling about aimlessly, and I wonder....how to dig you from my skin. But there isn't a way to do that is there? You're seeped into the deepest pores of me, a part of the atoms and ligaments and blood vessels that make up this machinery of mine..

To feel the rush of passion for your body, the need to pull strands of blond hair through trembling fingers, to need your lips against my ear.....to feel these things was always better than the numbness I had felt before you, I was once convinced. Now that this need is for a memory, it's like yearning for something already dead, something that will never....be able to return to you. It's like yearning for death itself; enticing but destructive.

I can still recall every detail of the last night you ever gave to me. Was it out of pity or was it truly...just a last high before you built up the courage to walk away? Why give me just another memory to store away in this graveyard of touches and whispers and moments? I tread on them with each step, stumble when I see you resting your head on the kitchen table, lost to me in a moment of your own. I feel the breath knocked out of me when I hear your faint laughter coming from the bedroom and I wonder for a fleeting moment if you've come back to me. But I know what I'll find if I open the bedroom door; an empty bed, the curtains blowing in the light breeze coming in through the open window, your scent on the air just my senses playing tricks on me again....

I feel your tears against my shoulder and understand them now as I hadn't the night you trembled against me and held me as if you were afraid to let me go. If I'd only known you would let me go the next morning and never look back, that you would never touch me again that way. Your fingers leave bruises on the slope of my back that will fade weeks after, a long enough time to torture me, a reminder every time I move or look in a mirror that you had disappeared into the wallpaper of this house as easily as you had told me hello that autumn day.

I touch the skin on my back where you fingers had been that night and see your face looking up at me, pleading.....afraid of something I don't understand. We were always so afraid of letting go. I held your hand so tightly, wrapped my fingers around your wrist so that it was inevitable you would break my hold on you.

I reach for you in the bed and it is as if you want me to notice the desperation in your eyes, but instead I focus on the small beauty mark on the skin of your neck. I brush my lips over it, burying my face into cherry scented hair and hide.....I am so good at hiding, you know this as well as I do. And you let me hide, stroking my hair back with hands I pretend aren't shaking. When I can't pretend anymore, I turn you over onto your stomach and your limbs rearrange themselves so easily....so gracefully, so....knowingly. We had always been able to anticipate one another. You moved, I moved, and no words were ever needed.

"I'm hurting," Your body told me that night as I traced patterns on the skin of your pale back with fingers and lips and watched you curl into yourself beneath me.

"Do you want to go to the new soba shop in town tomorrow?" I murmured into the gentle rise of your shoulder, deaf to the pleas of your body, of the eyes that looked up at me silently. You ignored my question just as easily as I ignored the hints.

It was as if I knew the moment you were gone when I woke up. There was a subtle shift in the air around me, an emptiness I felt as acutely as I had felt your presence every day of our lives together. I didn't have to stretch my fingers searchingly into the empty space of your side of the bed. I didn't need cold sheets and silence to tell me that you were gone. You had never left during the night before and when you called me hours later, when you were sure I had prepared myself for the end, I agreed to meet you on the shoreline where the water had been pulled away from the land.....low tide, the time of regret.

I'm tired of looking for you in every face that I meet. A leggy blond leans against the bar across the smokey room, hip jutted so precisely, arms crossed just so, that it couldn't be a mistake, it had to be.....

It isn't your face or your smile when she turns around to talk to me. In the moment it takes me to cross the room and dream up images of our earth-shattering collision, of a teary, red faced reunion, I already know it's only another fanatic illusion. You never hung around in bars to begin with. You hated smokey places though you were a human chimney and I was right beside you in that cloud of smoke, suffocating ourselves together in the aftermath of sex. Suicide is always better with someone by your side.

The pleading mantra of your moans can echo around my room at any given time. I tuck desperate prayers and honeyed words of my own into the hollow of your throat and the sensual indent of your hip. I drag my lips across smooth thighs that press close together in desire. The touch of your fingers in my hair, at that moment of absolute ecstasy is something not easily forgotten. My name is on your lips as you die that little death.

I lay myself down beside you and remember the warmth and your hand like porcelain against my stomach, made even paler by the moonlight from the window. Your smile as you throw the sheets over us is contagious and soon we're trying to smother our grins into each other's shoulders, clinging to one another and laughing because we have all the time in the world together. Our future stretches on and on as far as we can possibly see.

In your arms.... I had no worries. As much as I try, I cannot regret something that once made me smile.

"Kismet," You murmur, nose pressed to the pane of glass in the window of the kitchen. I lean against the counter behind you and smile, wondering at the gears turning in your mind.

"What is Kismet?" I ask you. I was never surprised by the things you let fall from your lips like riddles for me to pick up and examine. I loved that most about you. Your mind was as beautiful as your face, and the sighs you breathed against my ear in the middle of the night.

"It's fate. Do you believe some things are meant to happen no matter how much we try to change the course of them?" Your hand fans out beside your face and leaves a perfect hand print behind on the cold glass. How I had brushed your musings off that day and pulled you away from the window and back against my chest. It was snowing outside, the apartment a veritable icebox and us the frozen morsels inside of it. Instead of solving riddles, we had more important things to do....like warming each other up the only way we knew how. Winter was always such a fun season for us.

"What if some things weren't meant to die?"

And yet how I had tossed and turned over that single word that meant so much when I only had my thoughts for company. Kismet. It seemed the very tagline of my life. You had walked into my life as if it had been preordained to fate, and then I had tried to hang onto you kicking and screaming when it was kismet that you walk back out again. I do believe things are meant to happen and they will happen no matter if we're teary eyed children, holding tight to what we want with sticky fingers. No amount of temper tantrums can change the course of a river when it's bound and determined to flow where it will, where it always has flowed before you ever discovered it.

"I think I love you," You whisper against my neck. I feel your arms across my chest, the heat of you against my back.

"I've always loved you," I mutter into the darkness of this room, into the glass of brandy in my hand. The first time you pressed those words to the side of my neck was the beginning of the fall. You were the first to say it, but I had felt the whisperings of it in the park the day we met. It was the only way things could be...that we loved one another....it was how things were meant to fall. It was the kismet you pondered at the window that day. It was like telling me your name, or the date that day. I already knew and you already knew what we felt for one another, there was no grain of doubt about that. The only doubt came from how long this road would last.

It had started with music, this waltz of ours and hands that couldn't keep still. I walk down the stairwell to my apartment building, hands trailing the banister, tapping out the rhythm I hear coming from somewhere in the darkness below. You sit on the bottom step just visible by the blond in your hair, hunched over an acoustic Martin, an almost exact replica of the one that stood in my living room upstairs. I stand on the top step watching you, listening, not wanting to disturb this glimpse into who you really are. To see you alone and bared almost unnerves me and I must have watched you for an hour before you caught me staring. Your hand slips against the strings, jarring the sound so that it screeches unpleasantly, bouncing from the walls around us and startling me out of my reverie of you. You look up at me and smile, and I know that smile.....

"I felt you watching me," You murmur and there is a strangeness in the room that I can't quite pinpoint. I feel somehow caught and exposed....something of what you must have felt. You raise your hand to me in the darkness and I find it with a natural grace I pull from a forgotten place inside me. That was the first of many touches you allowed with music as our medium....our excuse.

"Why don't you play anymore?" She asks and without thinking I pull her hand away and shut the closet door with an aggravated snap. She had had your face at first, framed by light blond hair, dyed from a bottle and burnt to a crisp. I could never quite keep up the facade of you while running my hands through her hair, and her voice was never quite right. There was none of the soft honey I craved when she called my name, and her hands......the tips of her fingers didn't speak of years cradling a guitar. Eventually, I gave up the ruse and you faded from her bit by bit until you resided once more in the floorboards and in the scent of my sheets. She would never understand and I would never explain.

Each new beginning is your face. I bury my memories in their necks, smother your voice in their cries. I smooth your touch into their thighs and hope you linger just a bit longer than the last one.

"Just kiss me already," You breathe against the neck of my guitar. "I'm tired of this guitar between us." You glance up at me with eyes the color of weak coffee today. My hand slips against the strings and makes an ugly sound, the same sound I heard the day you showed up at my apartment, wanting more than I thought I could give you. You surprise me once again and it's natural as everything between us when I lean down and tilt your face towards mine. Our lips meet as if they were old friends, coming home to one another finally.

Delirium. It's the only word I can pick from an endless string of words to describe what you pulled from me in the months after that kiss. The addiction came on like a rush of water and I would have drowned were it not for your hands holding me up. Your hair fans out on the bed beneath me, those hands pulling me down into you, fingers dragging their way along my arms as I smother my need into your neck. It is almost too much for my shaking hands to control.

"I can't hold back," I whisper into hair that smells of cotton candy and sea breeze and the cologne against my pillow.

"Then don't," You growl, honey dark against my lips. I wrap your thighs around my waist and lose myself in you. I would have been content to stay lost if you hadn't let go of my hand.

"I don't know what you want from me. I don't know what to do." Her cries are muffled into the pillow you once bit into to keep from screaming as I wrapped my hands around slender hips. Sometimes I wanted you to scream, to lose control beneath me and leave yourself bare. I wanted all of you, every triumph, every fault.

"Tell me what to do," You tell me as you look up at me from the floor, cheeks streaked and flushed. You pull hair through fingers and shake your head. The loss of control is unbearable, a different loss of control than what I had wanted in bed. You who always knew what to do, knew the perfect words to say and how to say them, was suddenly lost. What was I to do without you there to guide me? I'm pitiful to the very flimsy core.

Your hand finds my mine beneath the table the next morning and my fingers slip through your own and hold tight. United but hidden, always hiding. You've forgiven me though I never did tell you I was sorry. I imagined whispering it into your hair as you lay dreaming beside me, having cried yourself to sleep. Why did you always forgive me? Why did you pull me back after every fight, after every angry word and start the dance again? We buried ourselves deeper into the sand this way, and we were never the wiser for it. We were only rushing towards a bitter end blindly.

I've somehow come to believe in your theory of kismet, and that one single person can define someone. I don't believe it happens to everyone, but once in a rare while, a person meets the other half of him that's been missing his entire life and suddenly, he's whole and alive as he's never been before. I believe another person's existence can determine one's own existence, and on the flip side.....the very morose and unfortunate flip side....the side that became my own, a person can exist solely for another person. In that way, fate isn't so kind or appealing.

I wonder if you would laugh at my musings as you did sometimes, cradling your chin in your hands, surveying me as if I amused you and was some form of entertainment for you. Or would you agree with me? Maybe you would lie down beside me and pick my mind? Perhaps you would mold our separate thoughts together and examine them as they bled into one another.

I look up and your finger is tracing constellations in the sky as we sprawl on the hood of my car, legs flung over thighs and arms tangled against chests until we're a veritable maze of limbs. We find Orion's belt, Perseus as the leaves change color, the fish tail of Pisces. Squinting, you connect the twins of Gemini, as if you were trapping them between your thumbs. You map out the lines of Pegasus while I map out the freckles of your neck and shoulder. I pretend they're constellations of their own. I find a star of four points near the dip of your shoulder, and the cup of Apollo is hidden beneath your collar bone. I want to reach out and trace the pictures on your skin but you're already grabbing for my hand and I find Hercules above us for you instead. When you lean in to kiss me, I see pinpoints of light like scattered constellations of their own in your eyes and it's all I can do just to hang on to you.

Sometimes you would cloak yourself in silence like a mourning shroud. Yours was always a loud silence, deafening when you wanted it to be. I lean out of the window of my apartment to catch the first drops of rain this year and I am suddenly back beneath the eaves of a nearby building with you. It's rainy season and you pull me to shelter before the season's first rain begins to fall. We sit on the steps to an abandoned shop in your old hometown, huddled close together but you're miles away from me in your mind.

You look out across the wet street, at the people hurrying out of the storm with umbrellas and newspapers over their heads and you seem lost somewhere out there, somewhere I can't reach you. I hold your hand in mine, your palm facing upwards and I trace the lines there idly, remembering the time you had gotten your fortune told. You would live a long life, lose many loves, and travel the world. You were a restless spirit with no home and you would remain so. I'd never expected to be one of those many lost loves, but I should have felt it coming as we watched the storm passing us by.

"It's not enough anymore," She mumbles to the table top as if I'm not in the room anymore. Already I'm ten feet out the door with my bags in my hand in her mind. Her voice melds with yours and you're both glancing up at me and then away, your face overlapping hers, and I feel as if I'm finally going insane. I want to grab at my hair, to slam my hands down on the table in front of her to make her look at me instead of through me. I want you to look at me. I don't know what's real any longer.

"I need more, and you can't give it to me. You're living in some fucked up reality, Aoi. Wake up."

"Wake up," You whisper against the nape of my neck in this bed of ours. "I attempted breakfast again."

"Did you?" I smile sleepily and roll over into emptiness.

I spend the morning burning eggs and rice and if I could burn water, I'm sure I would have done that as well. It's breakfast for one this morning, so there won't be any complaints on the blackened toast and the bitter coffee. It's just me and your ghost leaning against the sliding glass door to the balcony. You're there every morning, throwing jabs at me and feeding the birds that make their home in the eaves of the balcony. She left a cryptic note on the door last night before she decided to become another one gone AWOL. I crumple the note and toss it into the bin with the rest. I'll line her up after the others as you laugh at me from across the room. I miss your laughter.

You know how useless I am when it comes to domesticity, to rings and commitment, to women. You were the only one that ever had a chance of tethering me down.

"It doesn't have to be this difficult," You told me once, holding my face between cold hands so that I wouldn't look away. It never has to be difficult, but we make it so. We tear up the things we love between shaking hands and we scream into faces we should be kissing, and we don't understand......why we do this.....except, we feel too much. We feel until we can't feel anymore and there's nothing left to hold on to.

I try to drown myself beneath the shower head. This is good for camouflaging tears I usually deny. I wash the day's filth from my skin slowly, painfully. I sluice the exhaustion from my arms and scrub away the ache from my chest. There's a message written into the fogged glass of the shower, a funny stick figure drawn and traded for a smile, and then your lips press against the glass. I pull you into the shower to a cacophony of laughter. Soap slicks the floor when we're through and the shower is littered with shampoo bottles we don't have the time to pick up, so we slip and slide against one another trying to escape the ruined bathroom. We only make it to the living room floor, but that's good enough for us.

A person can get used to anything if given enough time. I've gotten used to the echoes of you surrounding me, to the touches of your hand that I've pressed into the floorboards of this house in my most desperate moments. I press my face to the floor as if I'm at prayer and I will the echoes to cease, but they only calm to a whisper and then a low hum that vibrates throughout my body, softer but no less cruel. There would always be what could have beens floating on the stillness of a summer night, in the tired eyes of someone who isn't you, in reluctant hands against skin that isn't yours. I still find myself pausing, turning as if to ask your opinion, before I realize you're not there, never really there with me.

In the dying light of the afternoon sun you lean against my car, waiting for me. You pull your hair over your shoulder to cover the fading shadows of scattered marks on your neck. I remember the creation of each and every mark, some hidden beneath the collar of your shirt, some in places no one but me ever sees. On the skin of your inner thigh, a bruise the shape of teeth remains hidden. When I pull the sheets from your body, your thighs press together in desire, and then part out of impatience, and I see the purple blush where my mouth had worshiped you only hours ago. That particular bruise was almost a constant mar on your skin, remade night after night after night until we were almost certain that it would be a permanent fixture on your body.

You catch me watching you from the building and the thoughtful look you had been sporting as you tried to hide our sins in your hair melts into that smile. You wave me over and I'm crossing the parking lot and running nervous fingers through my own hair like a fidgeting school boy. Every day was a first date with you and I wondered....when you would realize you were too good for me.

At night I can feel you awake beside me, your eyes searching the dark for things I can't understand while my fingers search for skin. My arm is draped over the very slight curve of your hip, my fingers lazy against your stomach. My cheek rests against the rebel strands of your hair on my pillow. My fingers remember the trembling of your shoulders, the silent pleas of earlier, another time completely. But now you are still against me, still stuck in the lingering of euphoria our bodies create together. I understand the need for silence now as you understand my need to touch you in this aftermath. The rise and fall of your stomach against my palm lets me know that we're alive.

To look at you was to look at a perpetual summer, it was in your hair and on your skin and even in the way you laughed. It could have been ten degrees below freezing outside but all you would have had to do was wrap your arms around me and winter was suddenly another time and place. I throw the blanket from my bed over my shoulders now and stare at the closet door in the hallway as if it holds all the answers I've ever tossed and turned over. But all it holds is the secrets I'm too afraid to face, and memories that should be long dead. It holds what had once been my livelihood before leaves in a park on an autumn afternoon stole it away. Before kismet and perpetual summer and eyes the color of weak coffee, there had been this. I hold the door open and tilt my head to the side.

To anyone looking in on me, I know I look for all the world...confused and maybe even terrified. And the culprit of this terror? The exact replica of your Martin sits on it's stand as it has for two years and counting. A thin film of dust covers the glossy wood surface of it's body. I can still see the fingerprints on the neck where our fingers had worn the wood down. I haven't set a finger on it since the day I decided it was too haunted. I stowed it away, neglecting to lock you away with it. There are too many ghosts in this place.

Your ghosts watches me from the end of the bed down the hallway. My door stands open and you tilt your head and run fingers through hair the color of summer. I never knew if you were mocking me by tilting your head the same way as I do when I'm upset, or if it was a natural movement. Like twins that are able to feel one another's pain, or married couples that finish thoughts for one another, you tilted your head with me as if somehow we were connected to one another's pain. Or at least that's what I always told myself.

I wonder sometimes if you still feel me wherever you are. I imagine a string in the palm of my hand leading out and down the stairwell, along the sidewalk, into the subway, out of the city, maybe out of the country. I wonder if you are still connected to the end of it. I don't wonder any longer if you'll find your way back to me along that string if you are still there.

I pick the guitar up by the neck and it settles it's self into my arms like a long lost lover. The wood warms to my hands and my fingers caress the strings, feeling their slack for what it is. They've been out of use for so long and were already old when I hid the guitar away. I rummage in the velvet lined case and find an extra set of strings and the old rag I'd swept over the guitar's body gently day after day with a ritualistic calm.

I lug all of this into my bedroom and sit down beside you on the bed. You curl your feet beneath yourself and watch me as if you know this is something significant, as if your ghost, your dusty memory has a working mind of it's own. This isn't a memory and yet you're still here, watching, curious as to what I'm doing. I'm not supposed to be digging up old relics and facing the past head on. I'm supposed to be wallowing in you, a rusty clock stuck on the hour of it's death.

I take my time in changing the strings, in tightening them with loving carefulness that is almost tender. My hand strums the strings, listening to the sounds that are all wrong. I tune it by ear until each sound, each pitch is perfect. You lean forward and watch me smooth the rag over the guitar, stripping away each layer of dust as I've been trying to strip you away each year slowly. You lay your hand on the neck, press your black painted nails into the frets, the grooves you had worn in, and your finger fits perfectly beside my own. I smile as I strum a few basic chords. My fingers press down gently against your own to get the D flat I need and before I know it, I'm sliding easily into one of the songs we once loved to play together.

"Don't let me go," You whisper into my ear and I'm swept away, pressed against you on a dance floor in some place you picked with closed eyes on a crumpled map from the dashboard of my car. You had wanted to run away one evening, somewhere no one would be able to find us, somewhere no one knew us and we could shroud ourselves in obscurity and in each other....

You reach behind your back and slide my hand where it presses to the curve of your shoulder and place it around your waist. I can touch you here in the dark where we are just two strangers holding onto one another, oblivious of anything but each other. You rest your head on my shoulder and I bury my face into handfuls of hair that smells of the sea and I feel the need in your body against me. With you fear was non-existent. If you taught me anything, it was to live and to run for precipices I might not survive. All that mattered was that I took the leap and I always found you waiting for me at the bottom. Now I take leaps and find only hard ground. I keep looking for you in the chaos.

"Let me brush it out for you." Your lips press to the back of my neck, cool and damp. I hand the hairbrush to you as you settle down behind me with crossed legs. You loved to pull the brush through the tangle of my wet hair after a shower. You could sit there for an hour or more, rhythmically stroking my hair, talking in low tones, until sometimes I fell asleep against you. These were moments when we could lay ourselves bare for each other. We would talk, chest to back, and the words would flow between us like a stream, without fear, without the condemnation that eye contact could bring about.

Tonight I don't want to talk. I feel the need for you that I keep coiled in the pit of my stomach reach for you. Your own need is always there to meet me, surging against me like a volatile downpour and I'm pulled under. I shake out my hair and water from the shower sprays you. You fall back with a screech and hit me in the shoulder with the hairbrush. I laugh and let you, though I hold you down by arms that are wet from my attack. You surrender for the briefest moment as I lean down to kiss you. You even lift your head and strain to meet my lips halfway, trapped as you are beneath me. You only pretended to surrender to me. We both knew you could have done anything to me and I would have let you. I would have followed you to hell and back, knelt down and laid my neck to the blade for you, and in many cases I did just that. In the end I closed my eyes as the blade cut skin.

"This love is perfect," You whisper against my temple, hands petting hair from my forehead. I am silent as I contemplate a forever I was denied.

I sit on the kitchen floor now placing you into boxes, a picture here, a small talisman there, the scarf that still somehow smells of you after all this time, into the mess we made it goes. The things you left behind have created a small ungainly pile in the middle of the floor. For too long these relics have sat around gathering dust like an unused shrine to you.

I had spent the entire morning tearing things from walls, sliding out drawers, rummaging into places I hadn't ventured into because sepia toned memories lurked there. Everything that you cling to I set into the box, averting my eyes as if this will somehow make it easier, but my fingers still feel, still run over the ridges of a broken frame.

A jagged scar runs along the edge of my palm, and for a moment I feel the glass breaking against my hand again. I can't help but to glance down, tired of pretending I don't care, that it isn't like putting pieces of myself into this box to seal away. A long scratch runs down your cheek, jagged over your smiling lips. The juxtaposition of the ruined frame and the torn picture, the cut running across your face like a scratched record is uncanny. And you keep playing on and on, always the same old song, the same frozen part.

My thumb runs over your lips caressingly and then I hide your smile away beneath the scarf and the snapshots of another life falling from my open hands. The pictures drift down into the dark recesses of the box and I close them away, tape them up and shove them into the corner. I think about lugging the box down to the alleyway but instead I throw my jacket over it and it becomes a coat rack for the day. Maybe later I'll feel like abandoning it somewhere. I feel your hands run through my hair at the nape of my neck, hair I've sheared short in the last year.

"Don't ever cut it. Just let it grow and grow and grow," You whisper against the back of my neck, your voice sleepy, an almost dreamlike quality to it as you curl yourself against my back.

"What am I? Rapunzel?" I tease and your laughter follows me back into the bedroom. I pick up the guitar where it lies lonely against the pillows of the bed where I left it last. Your ghost still sits beside me on the mattress as I sit down and pull songs from these strings I had once known better than my own hand. The songs come out a bit rusty now. I stumble over chords until I feel my fingers remember them and smooth them out as they should be. Your head rests on my shoulder but I barely feel it as I lose myself in the music. The music comes back to me and I remember. This is what is real at the moment, real and solid, and a part of me.

"I'm here, don't you see? Look at me," She screams, standing over me where I sit on the couch with shoulders sagging from all the weight of the world, but I don't look up and I don't flinch when your hands cup my face and tilt it up towards you.

"Look at me, Aoi." I glance up into your face and swallow down the bitter taste of regret. I don't want to regret you. I know I push you away from me with my need for you. We both push until there is no me and there is no you and we can't find one another in the madness.

"If this was the last day of our lives. What would you say to me?" You always asked me this after a fight. We couldn't fall asleep angry at one another. You couldn't let my last words to you before we drifted off to sleep be ones out of spite, untruthful because we were too proud to be honest on the battlefield. My answer was always the same.

"I love you."

You watch me as I always watch you, a thoughtful....soulful sort of perusal. Your brow furrows and your thumb rubs my cheek restlessly, your eyes moving across my face as if mapping out my features. I imagine what you see.....the slope of my nose, lips that I've always thought were too full but fit perfectly with your own, the jawline you told me was strong. The general boldness of my face was what accounted to the boldness of my actions, the wild abandon that struck me at inopportune moments, according to you. That boldness had me running head first into you and so it must have been true. Finally, you shake your head just the slightest bit and your hands fall away from my face and your words are like stones in the pit of my stomach.

Are those tears falling onto this guitar?

Not my own surely. Never my own.

"Some things are meant to die. Everything goes back to where it began eventually," You tell me. And so it does. We live in a perpetual cycle. We will always circle back to the beginning and then like children who haven't learned their lessens yet, we will begin the loop again. Like a bad song we can't help but to sing, we put ourselves on repeat and we dance again to the music.

But what if I want to step out of the cycle? What if I want to begin running, throwing off the tatters you've left me in and take a leap out of this tired dance? What if I want to love you from the box sitting across the room like a neglected lover, shoved into the corner and covered out of sight? What if.....I want you to leave me? I fall deeper into this well, my hands searching for something to hang onto, anything to stop this descent, and you look down at me from above, and you let me....fall.

"I know that I love you now." Always.

"Just kiss me once and then you'll never have to deal with me again." Laughter.

"Don't let me go." Never.'

"I need you." Do you?

"Aoi...let me go. Please....just let me go. This is all wrong." Lies.

I clutch my head between hands and let you wash over me and the words come as a river, and the promises break against the floor at my feet, and I don't know what this is anymore. It's driving me crazy, this numbing grief that isn't only grief any longer, but something on the borderline of madness. Most days I can't separate reality from illusion, you from her, and her from you, and even you from this empty bed. I live in a photograph pushed to the back of the relic box, my lips forever pressed to your own in a crowded frame.

"Just jump." Your hand finds mine between us and clutches it as we stand looking down into the river. I want to be bold like you. I want to follow you on your reckless adventures and feel as if I'm taking risks that mean something. I shuffle my feet nervously against the deck and look at you. You're looking at me and I search for a smile that isn't there.

"Jump," You whisper, squeezing my hand, and I do. I pull you after me and for a moment we're free falling, holding onto one another and your laughter is in my ear. And then our hands let go of one another as we break the surface of the water.

I settle the guitar against my lap and smooth my hand over it's body, wet with denial. I feel your arms wrapping around me, holding me as a song resonates from beneath my calloused fingers. I wrote this song for you before you loved me, before burnt toast and lazy mornings, before plunging into lakes and constellations against your shoulder, even before a jarred chord and a stolen kiss in the dark.

My shoulders are shaking against you, and I can't stop shivering because I feel the string in my palm pulled taught. I look at my palm and it is then that I know I will let the string break.

Your warmth is weak, your head against my shoulder something I feel begin to fade and I make no effort to keep it there, to remember the feel of your cheek against my neck. My thumb slides over the strings of the guitar and I can't hear your voice any longer. I feel something pulse where a part of you still resides, will always reside, in my chest, but I hug the guitar tighter to my body and keep you hidden where you belong.

I watch my fingers dancing against the neck, pulling summer and a tinge of euphoria from the strings. Your hand runs over the gentle curves of the guitar and I look away from your hand, from your eyes looking up at me. The only thing I hold close is the last smile you gave me when you loved me.

When the last tendrils of the song fades away, melting into the walls of this room, I look for you beside me and find only emptiness. I stare at the place you had sat night after night, legs crossed, my guitar in your lap, playing for me, your eyes pulling me in as I stood in the doorway. I stare until it really is only empty space, not even a memory anymore.

"I don't regret," I murmur as I place the guitar beside me and look away as you leave me.

************

A/N: Hulloo, just another thing I've dusted off and finished. I hope it was enjoyable. It's a melancholy piece and I know it may be a bit weird with all the past and present mixing, but I meant it to be a bit disorientating because the main character is simultaneously living in the past and present, and they diverge and separate for him constantly.