A Text

It's been years, and I still dream about you--your queenly roman nose, straight and pale below the soft fluff of your bangs, and your chin, as it leans on your hand, and then off it, as you lean forward with the weird, theatening intensity we both have when curious, or passionate.

I want to place my lips on your forehead, and whisper into your brain that you will be safe. I remember so vividly the evening I listened to you, gently touching your tired scalp with my fingers twirling in your long, light hair--hair very different from my heavy Asian thickness, hair that like you seemed like a wisp in the wind. You used to walk on tip-toe like a fairy, like my little sister did. 

I love you more with the passing distance, through space and time. I was never ever so happy as with you, not in the entirety of my life. Not with my husband, and certainly not with yours, not without you. You don't remember calling for you not to leave us alone? I despise your husband more with each passing month. It's sad, because I do remember, factually, loving him very much, and I factually recall a beautiful hike, and medical lessons, and playing with him, and you, and the children, but my actual feelings, beyond the facts, have melted and rotted past sweetness into this fetid disgust, rank with flesh maggots. I don't know if it was meat that rotted, or eggs, under the syrupy crystallized rotten fruit, and it used to bother me that I don't know--that I can't tell if I ever had pure joy around him, or if there was always this slight disgust, because I remember the moment you said you thought he was good-looking, and I wanted to laugh in your face, and I remember the moment when I met him that my first instinct was to be afraid of him. Which seems ridiculous, factually, because I know he was a friend, and I know I am responsible for Paradise Lost, but I also know those moments were true, and that what happened afterwards was true, and that right now, it is true that I despise him.

I despise him, and I despise the churches of men that warped the way you see humans and sexuality so you'll trust the wrong people and okay the worst human abuses, because if it were not for them, you and I would be together, still. I would still take your cooking to work with me; I would still do your dishes; I would still hold your children, and brush their wispy fairy hair, and tell them stories.

The last dream I had, you and I met in a coffee shop, and sat and talked while the children played. There was no one else. And you met my eyes, and you smiled.

Maw

He used to look at me
Eyes glowing with the light reflected off my brown skin in the moonlit scented spring
Rough fingers tracing thrilled goosebumps.

Now he cannot see me
Blinded--

--thought I from the pale sickly glimmer of my fat ill flesh, reflective in glutinous adiposity, but I healed myself, toned every muscle like cord, effort sizzling me like simmering sirloin, savory scent drowning other men's mouths with sweet saliva, sweated skin, and still he saw nothing, so--

Perhaps it was not light reflected off me, but light passing through me.
Am I dead, a hungry ghost, 
Translucent personality faded into memories
That I eat to fill in the space, pack on pounding pavement-chunks of person--
Person that is person, no matter how small,
"We are here, we are here, we are here"
I scream as I shove cake into my jaw
Hoping with rocks in my stomach perhaps it will weigh me down
Color in my lines
So he can see?

Or is he the ghost
The spectre of love dead
Translucent, pale like a cave fish
Jaw unhinged, drifting aimless
Jumping, dopamine flush, at the slightest tremor in the dark water
Fingers on the video game controller
The metaphor, like the man, is dead.

And til death do us part
So I die
And if I die
Before I wake
At least twelve hours it would take
Before he noticed.

I die
I must have died
For this is just a shadow
Of what I once called life.