you're an angel and don’t lie and tell me you’re not. kept up there in your city of angels, so far far away across that sea which has defeated me every day of my life even when i knew your name about as much as you knew mine: never, forever over the sea; speed bonnie boat like a bird on the wing over the sea to skye…
i think of you and the hollowness in my stomach and chest becomes an ache, like a dark swathe of gravitational pull which is wrenching apart my innards; fall, tangle-turn into the dark and split my heart into a 10²⁸ pieces, each one softly burning at the edges, char-grey with something i can’t name.
is this perhaps love? is this love, the fire that was my soul now breaking the bonds it was set in and threatening to spark into a butane inferno roaring through me? is this it, this feeling of falling forward into the void that was my world, black and stark with gaps that form and close like clots and slits in viscous liquid, this feeling of a thousand night-burnished stars blurring away into unreality in my mind and dragging, with the force of their speed, all my proper thoughts away?
whenever i hear your name from a stranger i start and turn like i would if i heard my own. this both disturbs and amuses me: has it taken me a mere twenty weeks to feel like i know you enough to wonder why other people know you? or do i not want them to know you; somewhere in my head do i seriously believe that you are mine, my knight in nondescript armour, all luminous eyes and retarded hair and chess and books and lies? that must be it; another sin for me, check it off on the list please: envy, green and deep, dark as a mountain tarn under the shadow of the rocks and warped pine-trees whispering spiteful little warnings.
and the dreams…nothing you wouldn’t want to know about (depending on where you sit on the eternal scale of weirdness), nothing i can seriously be embarrassed over: laughter, music. firelight. your eyes, shaped to fit your smile as you truly laugh out loud. the smooth brush of a hand over a hand. a walk, that begins in the winding backstreets of the city i've never been to (and you’ve lived all your life; god, in my dreams i saw it, then i looked up pictures: one and the same, how strange) and we run and we laugh and we scandalize the masses and we write complicated equations on out-of-the-way walls and when we come back someone has written “my but the vagrants around here are intelligent” so we begin a game of chess, in rows, meticulously drawing out each line in smooth black marker; birds-eye, pawn to D4, lines and lines of it. the rain comes and washes it away but it’s alright because somehow we’ve moved- not walked or ran or crawled; something we don’t have a name for yet- and we’re in a field of tall yellow grass studded with bloody poppies. the sky is so beautifully grey and the air is gentle and warm-cold and pleasant; insects call from the grass and it smells like it should, untouched by machines, all the way to the wide horizon and beyond to the mossy purple suggestions of mountains.
we lie in the grass and it isn’t awkward at all.
see how close we are?
i've never met you, i've seen you moving exactly four times and you don’t know i exist. we live across the sea from eachother, although “eachother” doesn’t work not just because it’s grammatically incorrect but because…there is only "each" and "other". they cannot be put together.
so how can i miss you?