Untitled.
Illustration by Sébastien Thibault
What do I write about? How do I write when I have forgotten to write? Do I write about pain, longing, love? Do I invite melodrama into works that I once tore, remnants of which were spread across my deathbed? It wasn’t my deathbed, after all. Do I write of nights, where I lie sleeplessly dreaming of my bed burning, voluntarily engulfing myself in the fire? Tell me, now, do I write about you, or her, or him, of love that wasn’t love or love that taught me more about hate than affection? Do I write with my blood; now does it disgust you?
I spent months writing to you, of you, through you. You, my muse, my shame. I wrote you and I sealed you inside a book that will never again see the light of my days. I ended you, ended the thoughts of you, you are beyond me and my truth is beyond you. Thoughts of you don’t upset me; these memories are on sale on a dirty Sunday street across the café where I tried to forget you, looking at you every regrettable day. You, with your dark long hair, my oriental home-brewed liquor obsession. Did you die seeing me die? I didn’t think so.
I smelled infatuation and blossomed obsession from denial, the fear of unattainable pleasure of holding my hand between your lies. You, my bad sex. You, my greatest pleasure. You. I learned never to forgive and wrote forgetfulness on my skin as I danced with you, day in and out, lights in and out, audience applaud and shout, the liquor-smudged red on my lips screamed at the envy and fear in your losing sense of reality. Did I drive you to insanity, or were you my disease?
Did you become your father or I took after my mother? Did we create a love so inhospitable that it poisoned us? Did I make the bed after you left or wept over our emotional one night stand? I would never know as I lay across the mattress without sheets with my bandaged feet, revenge written across our fates; if you crossed me, I vowed to cross the life out of your chest.
I waited for you, staring across at the bricked wall sitting in the balcony, adorned in rain. I had bruises between my thighs from when I laid across a hospital bed staring at you and the white lights, the two of you, the same, unreal, piercing. Where were you? How do I separate the pain of disease in my skin from the betrayal in your absence? Did we play tug of war? I tugged at your lies as you held my tongue beneath your feet. Did we succeed? Were we on the same team?
I hugged your mother goodbye like she had been mine. I kissed our son goodnight for the last time before he died. This time I held your heart in my hands and punctured a hole through it. I engraved in it memories with needles of days you came to me as a motherless son and a fatherless boy. I whispered to it, sweet-nothings dipped in gullible truth birthed from despise. I put it in a pan above the stove with your tea; served to you with borrowed cigarettes on foreign lands. There was pleasure in learning to leave you after you sewed my eyelids shut with love and guilt of your deeds, that claimed to be my deeds, when you screamed and hit me like splattered galaxy.
Now I’m colder than the month of January. Your face, only an emblem of perverse affection in my memory. Did I push you down the hill where you left me? I remember you crawled back to me late that night. While making you dinner to accompany your liquor, I waited for you to leave. You see, I manipulated you into your own disease. The absence of my words gaslit your thirst for attention and admiration, now beaten to a pulp by my absconding obsession.
//
//
//
Tommy’s Party - Peach Pit
Blackout - Midnight Divide
F.F - Andrea Dawson
Tilak - Bombay Bandook
Milk & Honey (Alt Version) - Billie Marten
Till Then - The Frightnrs
Young Folks - Peter Bjorn and John
Comrade - Volcano Choir
Hackensack - Fountains of Wayne
Closure (Acoustic) - Vancouver Sleep Clinic, Drew Love
Space - Maren Morris
Still - Seinabo Sey
Cold Little Heart - Michael Kiwanuka
Someone You Loved - Lewis Capaldi
Fjögur Píanó - Sigur Ros
PS. The tracks sound better on Spotify.