I Think I Might Be Nearing Sainthood
“I love you exponentially.” A sentence invented for him alone. A kind of gift, for someone that doesn’t exist, not really. In my mind, we stretch under the tropical lung and read all day long. I kill the world when I see you.
Dimly I might remember your face, in the flickering light of someone else’s fireplace. I will remember how I wanted to be wearing a blue coat when I met you, but instead I was wearing green and that is not how it was supposed to happen.
I might feel something important when I hear your name, something that could travel through my bloodstream until I die, but most likely I will feel nothing.
You will feel it when the last thought of you drops from my tongue into the cracks of the floor, so shallow and soft, it seems to have crept in, rather than been spoken. You will feel it like an itch on the back of your ear, no one is speaking your name.
Maybe on my lips I’ll keep the quiet wishes we had for each other and whisper them into the desert. Maybe I will shout our secrets into mouseholes and fill up the walls with their chattering. (“Well, I’m promising now that I’ll think of you never.” is what I actually said.)
You were a hole that I was always falling into so I buried you under my dirt, so that it became the tallest mountain on my heart’s horizon. Bodies always understand each other even when souls don’t. I think your body understands the crushing weight of the mud that makes up my mountain.
And what am I closer to now?
I might better know how I’m made: to have holes poked into me with each new love, and I’m falling in love all the time. Pieces of me are always falling apart.
There was a time when I was willing to slice myself up like a birthday cake and serve you each piece. There was a time when I would have bought you a lot of pretty things and offered them to you one at a time for the rest of my life. But the planets are devouring my youth now, more quickly than I first decided and I’m willing to be the loser. I no longer respond to my guilt when it knocks on the door.
I think I might be nearing sainthood.
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
