Maybe always the same

I've written this before.

It is at 8pm, half way on the walk to Shoreditch, when I talk to you directly. It is 10:30pm in a toilet cubicle, killing time. It is 3am a week night, with no reason to still be awake.

It hits me then. Not a slap or a punch. It hits me like a light tap on the shoulder, or at worst like the harsh bite you used to deliver to my bicep to announce your return with a beer in each hand, on a good night, with people around to impress with our affection. To impress with our seeming obsession with each other, blooming into my skin with teeth marks. It is 8pm, half way on the walk to Shoreditch, when I think of that photo – blue sky and lavender fabric against it. every centimetre of my skin looked happy and I am smiling and you can tell, though my face is thrown away from the camera, my hands just about to clap, and you, overjoyed. It was the first image my mother saw of you. She replied and said “Nice to see you both so happy. He’s handsome, I hope he’s nice.” In my bed next to me, eating ice cream that day, watching movies, you were.

Can I call you you a moment? Can I let the concept take your shape again? Can I balance that with prayers on evening buses to not see your form in a door way? Can I leave the nuance in understanding hands if I say too, I wish I could see exactly that? Feel exactly that ghostly tap, sit across a table, lean against that same smoking area wall. Then I would put the weight of the strangeness down - of the photos that line last year’s photo album and all the captions on the back written with love and hope, now of a stranger, who maybe one day people who look like me, and not at all like you, will ask about. I would put the weight of the strangeness down and simply listen to my music all the way to the cinema, talking to no one, rehearsing nothing.

When I think fondly of you, I go directly to your words and find a cure. I wish I couldn’t. Can I tell you that? Safely? Can I tell you that you were right? I didn’t love you as you were - I loved you as someone better. I hear that when I look for your voice somewhere in my gut, singing above my headphones, 8pm, 10:30pm as the girls chatter by the sink.

Can I lay it out? What do I do with the love that I couldn’t safely hold to any real form but sometimes still feel the weight of. I’d sit in a grieving circle with the other girls if I could but all of us would only look side to side at the empty palms of the other to see how solid each other’s almosts were, feeling oddly jealous of the brutality and the gore of the mess. I’d look down at my something still birth, something formless but still real and beating somewhere in it. Something only concrete in under-linings in books, something remembered in empty cigarette cartons and long dead and binned eucalyptus, and in the shadow that is still there on my thigh from when you bit me the night you met me and made a poem in just that.

It needs nothing else.

You bit me and it scarred. You bit me and it was bright red, I spent a summer bright red and purple and yellow, and now I am pale and clean and not where you remember me and not anything to you nor you to me. But there is a shadow on my thigh from the damage and I don’t even know how real it is. But I remember how the bruise felt.

Maybe that’s all it is. 8pm, half way to the cinema. I remember how the bruise felt.

But I’ve written all this before. Shoreditch, Holborn, Meersbrook, two roundabouts over from my childhood home though the location is hazy by now. “I’m rotted. I’m rotting. I’m scattered limbs I won’t go looking for. I’m dead there but I’m here, aren’t I. On the top deck of the bus and you’re here in Moorgate because I thought I forgot but I never seem to.”

I remember how the bruise got lines through it from my jeans, and how I never knew a bruise could even do that. But I’ve written all this before, just different images on a theme – the loss of love maybe always the same. “I let the thought exist in me as a weathering thing. Sometimes venomous, sometimes sad, always wounded lately, sure to steel in time but forever with a weak spot.”

I think I can find something beautiful in it, all the bones scattered countrywide, the gruesome map that’s a marker just the same. I think I can find something pretty now in the tripping and falling on the way to the cinema, but maybe it’s only because summer was in bloom in purple on my skin. The violet still romantic, the stain of colour against the silence of the death.