You’ve harbored their sympathies in your usual distress, only to drown by the grip of your insatiable ache for the lusts of pale hearts, for the wretched limbs of a child. How fleeting has your contentment been while you insist on its absence? You were never full of the sunlight that lit my eyes for the first time, and it’s been known this unrequited demise is not mine, but yours. It’s nothing like the ephemeral pleasures that slowly abandon ghosts like yourself, nor the passion of mine that you could never harm or endure. I’ll craft my bones from all the love no longer welcomed by the ruins of you; its wholesomeness was only dimmed for a moment by the debris of us. Every flicker of movement bares a more insistent whisper of forgiveness, of learning you cannot collect your volumes of love until he’s exhausted all his own.
I suppose you could say this is one more fragment for you to gnaw on, what’s left only to keep between nostalgia’s dull teeth, to feed the narcissistic infant sheltered by your misery. It’s a wild cry from the phosphorescence I used to linger in; when I shared my body like a secret and your skin was not infringing upon my own, when you wore down your desires on every tremor that polished the dullness of our flesh, and it caught your fever before it ripened into illness. Though it cannot be forgotten how commonplace such an event is.
I have not become the darkness, but more than it, while he has hoarded the deep rest we long to sink into. I’m adrift amid my own wounds, unable to be anchored to the vast sea of sleep until my sheets are purged of your ghost, of the way you would fretfully rub your feet together (a habit I temporarily acquired), of the way my leg rested between yours and the way I would press my lips to your cheek just as you were slipping into dreams.
We are left to eat his pain and you to eat your words. I am neither the remnants of us or your madness. I am not a companion in your junkyard of rusted lovers, all yearning to breathe their sadnesses into each others’ lungs. And with only the taste of disappointment on my tongue, we share loneliness as more of a meal than a disease.
I’m sorry darling, you disgust me.