There Is Always With You
Inhale. Exhale. This city exhales you, exhales you in every breath, breaths that take me further and further from us.
With the inevitable continuance of time, I am finally allowing myself memories of Calvin Klein perfume and the sound of sleeping breaths and the first moments of infatuation.
I am allowing myself memories of touches not being touches anymore, but rather foreign skin entering my domestic skin. Of awakening to tips. Toe tips to fingertips to hair tips. Before us, I never knew that humans could exchange electricity between one another.
Sloppy kisses in the backseat of a taxi, sloppy kisses against the apartment building, sloppy kisses in the elevator up to floor six, and a nasty unawareness of waning time.
And there is always the first night where you sat at my feet and things happened.
And there is always that second night where we sat on the moonlit balcony and things happened.
And there is always the time with McDonald’s McFlurries and you acting as a nurse to that stranger and me getting turned on. And me in Italy with you missing me and me missing us. And getting high in the red and blue Ferris Wheel, speaking with wild thoughts and bright imaginations and all the countless moments afterward and in-between.
And after my time with you, people question my sanity when I stupidly tell them that there’s a lot from your and my brokenness that I still long for. Between us, I miss the January air that pained my lungs to breathe in because then there was you. I miss throwing books across the room in fury because then there was you. I miss watching you fall out of love with me because then there was you. I miss sobbing on the cold church floor, praying for God to wake up from his nap because then, at least, then there was you.
10 years down the road, my friends will call me unhinged when hints of you bleed from my words, and I’ll tell them not to worry and that I’ve moved on, but deep in my brain, there will still be you. Because you became, like, 67 percent of me. In the way I cry at the moon. In the way I cherish sunny rain. In the way I inhabit my mass. So fear not. I’ll carry you with me forever because there is always this time, that time, there is always with you.