Start At The End
It's to you, really, I owe my life. To you.
The debt, the position of this debt, it's become more than I know how to sustain. Each breath I take, its shape is sculpted by your need. Each thought, where it goes and doesn't go, its boundary is your desire. I've no words but those meant for you. I've no desire but what you stir in me. I've no thought but in answer to the question you ask. No answer but to your call. Through all these years, now, these twenty-four years, years spent together and apart but never separate, inside me "I" has always been the sound I've heard when thinking "you". Somehow surveillance has been transformed into a vigil of love. No one misses me, no one experiences my absence. I'm the space between your words, the darkmatter of your syntax, the fog your breath makes when we sleep outdoors. My desire only finds its space when yours has been exhausted. My desire is refuse, trash, waste, excess, ort. The dark nonhuman eyes beneath the table.
When I found you on the gravel, when I first heard your feet on the gravel, twenty-four years now gone, I carried a bag of tools, coming home from a job. A bag that was my exact body weight, filled with blades and strikes and shields. You had a bag too, I'd say now it weighed exactly the same as your head. There was a thorn bush there, by the shed, green flaking paint on the old plank door. I heard your shoes, the heelheads crushing the stones, and because it was dusk there were ripples on the air made by your feet. I know exactly the season, because I'd come back from installing a ceiling fan for a judge. Had to put the ladder on top the oak dining table, the ceilings in that vast apartment were so high. She'd been recently divorced and her teenage girl had moved back in with her, so she'd put the AC in the girl's room, and decided just a fan was enough for hers. I left greasy fingerprints on the ceiling. I remember noticing I refrained, consciously, from cleaning them up.
And you walked on the gravel as I walked away from my car remembering not cleaning up the stains of my hands and I heard you like feeling blood wash over me in a dark shower. It was like I drank you before I saw you.
But that's so long ago, so long ago for a life to owe so long.
I see now, what I took to be our history was yours, and I was transcribing. And I find myself waiting for your sleep now, your absence, your work, to feel alive. To feel myself squeeze myself out the narrow spaces that are all that are left me since I've cleared my world for you. Since I've withdrawn to become the boundary of the world itself, so that you have as much space as you need, as I can manage to give.
Funny how your complete acceptance of me, of everything about me, seems to have made me vanish.
The debt, the position of this debt, it's become more than I know how to sustain. Each breath I take, its shape is sculpted by your need. Each thought, where it goes and doesn't go, its boundary is your desire. I've no words but those meant for you. I've no desire but what you stir in me. I've no thought but in answer to the question you ask. No answer but to your call. Through all these years, now, these twenty-four years, years spent together and apart but never separate, inside me "I" has always been the sound I've heard when thinking "you". Somehow surveillance has been transformed into a vigil of love. No one misses me, no one experiences my absence. I'm the space between your words, the darkmatter of your syntax, the fog your breath makes when we sleep outdoors. My desire only finds its space when yours has been exhausted. My desire is refuse, trash, waste, excess, ort. The dark nonhuman eyes beneath the table.
When I found you on the gravel, when I first heard your feet on the gravel, twenty-four years now gone, I carried a bag of tools, coming home from a job. A bag that was my exact body weight, filled with blades and strikes and shields. You had a bag too, I'd say now it weighed exactly the same as your head. There was a thorn bush there, by the shed, green flaking paint on the old plank door. I heard your shoes, the heelheads crushing the stones, and because it was dusk there were ripples on the air made by your feet. I know exactly the season, because I'd come back from installing a ceiling fan for a judge. Had to put the ladder on top the oak dining table, the ceilings in that vast apartment were so high. She'd been recently divorced and her teenage girl had moved back in with her, so she'd put the AC in the girl's room, and decided just a fan was enough for hers. I left greasy fingerprints on the ceiling. I remember noticing I refrained, consciously, from cleaning them up.
And you walked on the gravel as I walked away from my car remembering not cleaning up the stains of my hands and I heard you like feeling blood wash over me in a dark shower. It was like I drank you before I saw you.
But that's so long ago, so long ago for a life to owe so long.
I see now, what I took to be our history was yours, and I was transcribing. And I find myself waiting for your sleep now, your absence, your work, to feel alive. To feel myself squeeze myself out the narrow spaces that are all that are left me since I've cleared my world for you. Since I've withdrawn to become the boundary of the world itself, so that you have as much space as you need, as I can manage to give.
Funny how your complete acceptance of me, of everything about me, seems to have made me vanish.
posted by J. Neptune at 12:45 AM
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