i never got to tell anyone exactly how i fell for you recount the moments meticulously like i would if i were writing a recipe a doctor’s operating manual a washing instruction

cold wash, 20 degrees sullen, swooping mountains are all one can see for the entire misty day you waited for me and by sunset you caught a glimpse of me you opened your arms in glee when my clothes still reeked of rain

delicates cycle, for linens and silks a special detergent that smells like roses you played a song i loved as a child and looked at me when i tried to cry in secret i knew from that moment that none of me could be a secret to you anymore

no tumble dry, air out, lie flat you had a fever and played it off as nothing to not to add to my worries i curled up next to your hand subconsciously, consciously, desperately, silently you smoothed over my hair and i sighed out everything i couldn’t say in the night air

i cannot sustain such a stain like you i cannot sustain a disdain for such a stain like you it is i that needs to be washed away dissolve and dismember me in the eco mode

because that’s the only way to breathe because language puts pain at ease at least just for a little while

our story grows stale the texture of it disconcerting and the fabrics of the space between us becomes gritty when it shouldn’t be

i thought we had closure had imagined a hundred different ways of this ending badly all convincing enough for me to believe in i thought i had ripped out unfinished scripts and drew universes around the ink blotches that look like black holes where my pen had stalled, dripped and shivered had drawn stars on top of tear stains and unleashed us from the chains told myself i’m happy that it’s over before it begins

But the cage is still here and I sing on No watch guards around You held me captive still in paper mache walls with your hesitance and your infinite, dizzying tolerance

and i stand here still, my words come out raw because that’s the only way to breathe only way to fall

If I could count the ways I love you I still wouldn’t be able to understand why I can’t unlove you and disentangle my soul from the not-world we made why I can’t flee from the sooty ruins and the smell of coals and watch my burn fade

I still wouldn’t be able to un-learn the heat from your palms the shape of the space right below your collar bones where i’ve kept an un-shed tear every time you hugged me

Even when I can enumerate every single time I catch myself soaring down the depths of an unknown canyon like a wet leaf I still wouldn’t be able to describe how I felt when I caught a whiff of the perfume I gave you as you walked by my side The one I also own With hints of osmanthus but not the joyful and crisp kind The sulking kind, syrupy Almost wine-like.

You smell like me and my casked pain that brews in the dark

after everything is said and brushed away we now share a kind of intimacy that counting cannot keep score for like wine so thick you cannot pour it runs deeper than a three Mississippi hug or a five second glance and the pain runs deeper than numbers could ever tell because we are getting too comfortable with each other and love grows to a gnawing hunger but the truth will always prevail

i often wonder how our story will be told if we had met differently would we grow old together, or become the friendliest enemies

if we were the same age or from the same town sat next to each other in the cinema or walked our dogs on the same lawn

we could have met at the bookstore reaching out for the same spines have you ever wondered how beautiful it is to call those liminal spaces “spines”? you must have because i have too

you would’ve been very polite and let me inspect it first would you have tried to steal a glance at the pages or the creases of my shirt?

if i was about to take away the last copy would you follow me to the till? would you be able to tell your story or keep your silence still?

I’ve created a monster by laying bare my cards and letting you go I fed it the shards of my rain-soaked bones and watched it fatten in a season where leaves have fallen

The pain has morphed into something even more difficult to describe a lingering tremor like Big Bang’s leftover noise

i took a shower in the dark just now because electricity was out i lit a candle to place in my wash basin you said “how romantic” a typical thing you’d say about a situation that obviously demanded a different response you always reacted differently to my expectations and it often made me think maybe we indeed don’t belong

None of that really matters now because i’ve created a monster that howls a monster who weeps and mewls at the undying afterglow of a bonfire or a candle as it drips scorching tears This metaphor makes even more sense when “Afterglow” is your favourite song

i’ve created a monster who rages against an impossibility, someone who knows what’s coming about a monster who dies when the lights go out

you sent me a photo you took of a rose burning in a bonfire i marvelled at how poetic it looked against my untamed heart you and this moment seem to conspire

you told me about this day at the beach where a sunset has set everything on fire and marshmallows had to be roasted on roses and their shadows danced like real lovers

i think about how we shared this memory over the wires, so to speak and then i think about the people who lived this memory with you on that beach who probably made a better comment in accordance with the mood and the flow of your speech

i can’t hear you speak or sing a song for those around you i can’t have you know i’ve been writing poems about you

you printed out a photo i took of you and kept it under the glass surface of your desk your smile all glassy opaque because it was taken on a misty day

i still see that photo before it became one as i stared through the viewfinder i remember the moment i clicked on the shutter one flash. our eyes crashed in that nugget of a second a piecemeal attempt at eternalising something that was already dissolving

like honey in water

it rained when we went to get those photos printed another memory witnessed by none i almost doubt its authenticity we combed through the town on that scooter in the maze of alleyways i held on to the hem of your shirt a future self regretting not having my arms around your waist instead. why did your skin burn like that if none of it was real? what was it supposed to mean knowing what i know now?

i gave you a photo for my birthday the one i still have on my shelf a fraction in time forever shelved and kept still. i guess that’ll suffice.

that’s the kind of love i feed off of now a photograph, a metaphor.

i laid down on wet grass today staring at the disappearing clouds thinking about how you and i have done something some lovers never could they could’ve stayed as one, unbroken and forever but never became themselves and healed

we talk about the rain but never enough about the wet scars on the pavement or the grass that end up soaking my jeans we talked, over the phone at 3 am choking up to the sounds of the rain to heal properly but we never talked about how healing is painful too

it leaves behind a dampness a soreness not an urge to scream but a need to curl up and be still. stilling the disquiet from times gone by and finally, finally feel hurt on behalf of an old self younger and deader than myself who never got around to feel for herself

to heal is to eulogise.

i lie down feeling tenderised like a piece of sirloin With my hopes shattered, toying the illusions i coined still i leak bloody tears but my soul feels light untethered from the sinews of the past for the first time ever you unweave the web of fibres that were aged wounds and those ghost like tendons snap to free me

if there’s any question left there’s this: how do i remember someone who freed me from my past and disappeared from my future?

how do i remember wounds that healed and scars that were never left behind?

when nothing ever happened and will never happen whose words does the memory live in who’s left to trust?

how does one move on from something that didn’t happen?

how would you depart from a place that didn’t exist on the maps exiled from definitions, a void that entraps

how do you move on when you cannot move a limb paralysed, stupefied fossilised in place like chalk white cliffs mulling over an alternative landscape where your tectonic plates will collide with mine forging peaks and valleys that promise a little more possibility

how could you have waited so long to ask what was it that haunted me silenced me, something you did wrong and not have seen any signs? were you deaf to the undertones of my sighs or blind to the way i couldn’t hold your gaze for a long time?

how did you forget it so effortlessly something i’ve etched on my skin the rolling mountains that told us we could never, ever win?

how are you so flawed, unaffected infuriatingly young and terrified and somehow made me terrified?

how could you not know the way my heart feels when you’ve made the place your home?

how do I keep asking me these questions when i don’t know what i want to hear?

a window is stuck open and i’ll have to live with it i chew the phrase over with my molars swirl it with my tongue chafed by its bitterness it sounds foreign even in a tongue i’ve mothered for years is there anything you don’t “live with”?

i’ll have to die with the dead memories of those brooding mountains and their prehistoric sounds that sounded like breaths punctured by a lone rooster’s crow it pierced through the glass of my window when it was still closed

you stayed in the room that was one window above me and i heard you open it one night. your footsteps caress the floor the night air gushing in to drown out your heartbeats, away from my earshot and encode your words in a language i do not speak

it’s strange how i had forgotten about this moment until now now that my ears are stuck open to listen and my eyes are stuck open to decipher my heart is stuck open to quiver in the winds that blow in

i live with it now.