in your absence
I don't know who I am without you. I don't know what's left. You gorged at my peach skin, gnawed through my cherry flesh, reaching for the stones in my chest. My cyanide core laying bare atop two twitching legs, unrelenting in your assault. I should have died, should have tried harder, breather deeper. I welcomed your fingers interlaced with my hair, the indent of your hand around my throat, the marks of nails in my skin. I let you push me under, I begged for it, even as my body screamed for air. Why did I let you, my jaw clicking open and limp, letting you flow throughout me. I breathed you in with a hunger, watching your face grow sour as you perched above me. I watched your features distort at the water's surface, watched your lips grow closer, closer.
I let you haunt me, let myself become just like her, screaming for a son already lost, a husband long gone. You unlocked that within me. I'm repeating myself, I have to be, I've become nothing more than the pattern you've trapped me in. I should have drowned, I should have breathed deeper. You were my punishment, laying that path for everyone after you. Your lingering smell perforates across all I have lost. A smell of rotting plums, of something too sweet, something sickly, something that burns. You're the sickness caught behind my tonsils, the pearlescent, shimmering stones that catch upon my tongue, between my molars. That's stones twice, once at my core and now once in my throat. Where else did you burn me? Where else have you placed these within me? Did I once ask you to? I'm sorry, I'm so forgetful, maybe in time you'll help me remember, set me straight. Why else would you persist? Why else for the mold that grows beneath my ribs. Where else can I find you? The sound of dragging nails behind my ears, the flicker of shapes across my vision, the worms behind my eyelids. Did I ask this of you? I should have said no, I thought I said no, I wish I said no.
Do you remember that drive along St. Georges? My window down, both hands on the wheel. I told you all of this once but you fell silent, responding with only a snaking hand across my thigh. Was I lying then? Is this ghost of you a lie too? Or something to keep me in check? Remind me of my nature? It must be. Life can't be so neat. Life can't just repeat, on and on in whirlpooling puzzles all circling the same start, middle and end. Patterns are only there because we deem them so, only real because we let them be. If a tree falls in a forest did it ever really fall? If a girl is raped in the dark, leaving only ghosts in her wake, could it ever have really happened? Maybe once yes, a singular event, a single toe in a pool of grief. I'm sure of this, I remember this, I have to, you have to as well. I can't stomach the idea of this weight lying upon my shoulders alone. What absurd metaphor or manner of prose could I hope to imbue here? The likeliness of a deforestation before not a single eye? The absurdity of a pattern without any vision, any reason to be? I don't know if this matters, but please keep going, I don't know if I ever said, felt, heard, held any of these things in good faith. I'm so sorry for doubting you, I'm so sorry for fearing those nails in my scalp. I know I missed it then, but maybe, maybe now I can try again. This time I'll breathe in. this I know to be real. This I know to be true. I'm sorry it took so long, you know how scared I can be. I'm so sorry for ever saying no, I promise this time I'll sink as you demand. I promise I'll let you in. I promise to hold you within my lungs. I promise to keep you at my core until my vision fades. I promise to be your wraith.