Monday, June 3, 2013

O


then to now.
 
 that chasm dug by hand. by my hands. my hands scooping up the brains of the man i loved after a bullet tore through his skull and put me out of my mind.
they were my hands, small again, gathering november leaves for confetti. my hands. 
mind had become brain, brain became brains. brains betrayed the infinite space of me, of him.
my own lacey thoughts and teatime notions of what would always be, what was subject to fate and gravity -- all sent wriggling  across the cosmic blackness of the car. a death not unlike the beginnings of life.
if only we had stopped instead of creeping forward into that impossible space. into that bubble where even the brightest stars turn inside out.
stolen. dragged away from ever putting him back together again. if i turned to look at him, he’d dissolve forever.
but it wasn’t his blue remains that I tried desperately to recollect, to re-member him piece by piece.
– this was all so terribly wrong.
it was my hands trying to quickly hide the evidence that this man could fall, that he could break.

because then, nothing was safe.

and the world was suddenly colder. no lighthouse to bring me to shore. nothing to keep.

i could suddenly feel the pearls around my neck, perforating and pure. dressed up for our own funeral, but it was me they were burying.
suddenly remembered the foil dinner I’d left in the microwave for hours. the hot afternoons spent waiting, fanning, pacing. shoes left untied. babies unfed.
if only I had hidden the pieces of him in the folds of my dress. hidden them anywhere, to sort through later, on my own.
but he was trampled under the stampede of legend. and i painted my eyes on every day that.
after seeing his brain, his human matter, scatter as any broken thing would – like any mangled sea star, butchered lamb or mutilated saint would—i saw that my prince was merely mulch. only mortal debris. the champagne firelight, the thrill from middle to middle,  butterfly thrusts, bloodbaths and memos were only there to distract me. red velvet blindfolds to hide the man from the magic, the magic from the man.  
i saw the world differently after that. and the world saw me turn to glass.
i watched my hands, still clutching what was left of him, begin to think and crawl and press onward, even as i looked back.

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