a conversation

Dear you,

Yesterday it was our anniversary. This morning we spoke on the phone.

There is a mess of you everywhere inside of me. With striking clarity I remember the fireworks that blew up the sky above us, the sky that for at least that night, that moment belonged to us – only us. But I also hear your voice, whispering in my ear ‘be with me’ but beating gruffly in my ear ‘you never cared for me.’ Where do we go from here? Where are we, even?

My love, sweet love, you hate me. You are bursting, no imploding, with a tired, dirty fury. I have done wrong by you. I know that to be true. Though you may doubt my love, it still lives and breathes and beats in me and yet I have hope for us.

I am worried about you. I don’t know what or where in your life you are now. I miss you. I miss you most of all.

Though you may imagine me, here, or anywhere, wanting parties and drinks and boys and girls and  sex and this and that – no, my love. I want stillness in me. I want to feel free from the angst that tears me up inside. I want freedom from the memory of boys reducing me to limbs only. I want freedom from the boy and girl who made me small as anything, who tormented and tortured and squashed me so. I want stillness and breeze and a room of my own.

And no matter what. I love you. You might not know what that means but here it is: from you I draw some of the best of me, with you I know what it is to know real joy, of you I remember caring and companionship and togetherness at its sweetest and it’s purest, and in you I see, still, the body of a boy beside whom I wish to breathe my last breath.

I love you madly still, four years and forever later.

Off to Portugal, heart. Take care of you, and if that means hating me the I suppose it should be it.

Love you, love you madly,
Me

*

Dear dear,

I wish you had cared fully and undeniably as you described, for then you would know I could never hate you. You would know that I have fought ravenously for you against armies unknown and unrelenting. You would know that I have loved and loved and loved and loved. And you would know that that last breath you wished to have would have been provided by my last exhalation beforehand.

What you feel, what you hear, what I have provided you in the soiled unbecoming I have become is nothing more than the attempt to both provide that stillness, a stillness I myself wish, and to not be able to give it for I have battled so long. I am scarred. I am scared. I am cared for, but not by you.

Of course you would reject this again in a claim I can never refute and a sentiment I can never dismiss and hundreds of moments you remember against the nothingness that forgets us now. But know again it is true for it is I saying it to you – the cared after, the lack thereof.

You have found another, though there was me. You have swallowed love, though you needed not to. You have been nothing but devastated and have acted in devastation. I am a falling rock above. A grey cloud in the sky. Look how I rain.

And like this rock cometing to earth, a sweet earth of you and your legs and arms and whole body that brings much more than I could know I needed, I have been burned. Dissolved in the atmosphere of your last breath, the one that does not call my name.

I have seen this finality many times – the intense oxygen in my mouth, and now in others. I cannot unsee it. That would mean I close. That could mean I choke. And I have already tried that on myself with poor, living, languid results.

You say that I blame you for this, which is false, in the very way you indirectly blame me for your feeling of being a rented body, which is false too. But it can go on like that, cannibalizing each other to make little ground in our dignity and actions, some of which you told me you cannot regret. I share this undeniability – I regret you think I could ever hate you. All I do is love you. It is all I have known. It is why this is so terrible for I am so unloved, uncared, unKacper.

I am convinced that you will find that peace you hazily dreamt in me. It happens this way. After the comet comes the cooing – the silence of air again. You will find those breaths. You will inhale easily. And you may remember that this same oxygen is required for burning again and you will try to hold yourself in and you will pour out an emptiness from you I could never touch or understand.

I sometimes assume I have fallen in there to the closest part of you. It is warm. There is night. It is depth that is not good to hold one’s air in for. A depth I do nonetheless.

I have gasped, though, against the endlessness of your suffering. In its blackness, I now remain a light afraid of the dark. I cannot provide what you need. I am a yell. I am a lost thing screaming for home.

And as I continue to burn needlessly, there are bits of happiness I recount like you do. Moments captured as that room of its own, as the reminder that ash is always kept. In an ornate jar, I become a good way to recount the dead, or at the very least, stain the carpet. I am told ash is also good for the hair, which of course, is dead itself.

I hope your hair remains fingerfood and your arms are unshaven and you understand that you are you are you are. I, slowly and stupidly, am not ours anymore. All fireworks stop. Even we must sleep in a tired, dirty, smoky world.

Put your head on mine in yours like then, though – an imagined scruffiness and calmness I no longer nurture, a silent repose, a vacation of sun. Let Portugal be that too. I am sure it already is. That is why you went, right? That’s why you didn’t plan to do otherwise with me, right? That’s why there is no this is wronged why, right?

Nonetheless, I will go back to the ceaseless cavern of you, dear. I will be in that silence you seek. Find me there when there is nothing more to ruin and unweave, like that scarf I never received for you were busy being. Sorry that being led to nothing and nothing again. Sorry you couldn’t see I would go elsewhere with you. Sorry that the only hate I have is for myself thinking I was the only one who could bring you in this restless rest with me and within you.

Sorry this wasn’t the case. Sorry I still love you sadly,
Kacper