from the depths of a cold fall you were brought to me and from the depths of the city i reached for you. you were the at the apex during those years i lived at night. the nights were too long to remember and passed through us, between us, but in the brightest lights you took me to the shore of the sea. we balanced on trees that the ocean had had its way with then tossed aside. we didn’t see them as a causality, even though we should have. it was only the beginning then.
years later, we drove up island. i had joined them in that bright light, but you remained in those depths. the summer’s sun lit you up, i remembered the love i have for you. it's the story i tell, it's the mark you’ve left. it's the part of you i can call my own.
you left at the beginning of summer in the same way we had met (in the spring that had fallen through my hands just before), not fortuitously, deliberately. and while you were away, our apartment followed the movements of the sun, and the heat wouldn’t allow for sleep. i wrote to tell you how time wasn’t bringing you closer, “today is still today, and tomorrow will still be tomorrow”, but you reassured me of the moon, “I beg to be released to you - it ain’t too long, it ain’t too much, but i miss all of you, anything, all of it. but one day were going to wake up, like we had been dreaming together all night and i’ll be home”.
you came back during a heatwave. you obliged the knight of cups, while i lived violently in the suit of wands. i can’t remember how the summer ended, because the the fall came so loudly, while you tried your best to keep quiet. and my biggest regret is not forgiving you for the change of seasons. we moved in the middle of winter, neon lights lit our bedroom at night and it felt like the sun again, but the resentment against it came on stronger, and fell heavily in a different context; time wasn’t bringing you closer, and i used everything you had given me to chase the coast of california.
i stood above the trees to look on at it, when it was over, it was summer again and i could see the stars (like we had), but you begged me not to tell, “monks in the cloisters not a word from a woman hail mary was born, thought alone does indeed make monsters”.
without you, the ocean or the sky, i was among sea creatures that told me about the colours that create the dark. they came to me in different forms by the contradiction to be attracted to the light. the deepness of their colours surprised even the wildest ocean storms. i remembered them through metaphors of their darkness and in silence i told them so, even though they would never comprehend. only you, on the surf of the sea could understand what they never would. on the easiest spring day, the salt still in your hair, you understood where i would meet you, in past tense not present.
the nights were deliberately long, and i endured every constellation they offered and still begged for more, but the city lights only gave so many (orion’s belt - the first i had ever seen). heavy with the warmth from all of the animate and inanimate you’s, i dulled the pain of lost words with banality. i no longer marked pages with words, but instead left memories of you in their place. i mourned them silently and longed for their weight, and i buried each one as if it has been the ritual all along. the mornings had a softer darkness that can only be described without long phrases of metaphors that i had adopted. i made attempts to thrive there by ignoring the loss. the prairie skies painted themselves gently and reminded me how far away the sea had become and how far i had to look.
these aren’t memories of love, because when you saw the damage you had left, (your own sick tattoo, and when you looked on at it your were proud to find that it felt more like a trophy) you saw it wasn’t a tragedy, it was high tide. and when you reached this beginning (that's not really a beginning at all, but an ending) is when you would remember me. my fingers tracing the bones in your back, memorizing the ridges of your spine. mapping the edges of your shoulder blades, as if they were the plates of the continents, spreading my hand across the place in-between. my fingers filling the distance that separates us. but with a little more empathy for the sense of touch, you would have felt the pressure of my hand pushing the oceans up over the shores.
i asked you to remove the linearity from time passing, so from the beginning you told me it was the end.
in the aftermath i was blind, i traced collar bones looking for the one that belonged to you. yours had a scar that mirrored the ridge of your nose. for each one that wasn’t yours, i offered all sorts of apologies i owed to you. and it was only in blindness that i stood in front of the pacific coast that i could sense the separation of sea and sky. in contrast to the cries of the sea, and only in blindness, could i feel the calmness of you, the sky. you, collar bones of clouds and eyes of dreamy blues.
the first day was the day the clouds were effortlessly grey. i didn’t have to stumble through memories to remember what kind of blue the sky was. it was the second day when the grey fell a little heavier and deeper within the clouds that i began to forget. and by the third day, when the sky was cement above us, i couldn’t remember anymore. i am not even sure that the blue has ever been real. would you tell me it was, even if it wasn’t?
she told me once it was a thousand shades of turquoise and teal. she told me about the parts that were navy and cobalt. she could describe anything so beautifully. only, she wasn’t talking about the sky, she was talking about the ocean beneath her feet, because although she lives in the clouds, she can only ever remember the sea. she could see that i could not see the colours, so she took my hand and told me, “you don’t have to remember what it was, remember what you want it to be”.
he had a scar like the mid-atlantic rift. he told me about the things that lived in its depth kiwi hirsute, promachoteuthis sloani, peniagon diaphana, each one held memories that fell like lines of poetry. he came from the depths of ocean mountain ranges, he came from adaptation. he thought i was a constellation, but from where he exists, i came as a reflection. he was not so much a sea creature, as the tendencies of one, i approached him with a tepidness that sang contradictions of adaptation and reminded him of falling lines of poetry, Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
The fall brought an Indian summer and returned the hues to the sky, during the September heatwave I met North, and called him so because he brought the cold fronts into November with every intention of direction. he told me to look West and with cold hands he held my perceptions as i watched them shift. i watched the sun set into the sea and it faded into the depths i had settled into, but not before leaving its reflection as a monument to things once lived.
“i can’t remember anything”, i told your tides. it came out as the truth, but the silence that followed entailed lies. i can remember him vividly, the tides originate from his pull. he remains ownership of the pronoun that i fight for the transitional ambiguity it's supposed to hold. but what he had created, he created to call his own. the biting gash he left isn’t what i had told or claimed it to be. it's not a measure of a fleeting fight, it's a projection of low ocean tones. i learned the language it speaks, and tell it in undertones only he can hear, “you tied a thousand lies together to cross the sea,
just like i had asked”.
i heard that they called you The Sea. your rib cage felt like the sand at the edge of your shores, the waves made each one, while you called me each phase of the moon. i used what i had learned to pull you away, “je ne sais pas” she had said, and i had taken it to heart. you said “crescent, what can you remember?” and in my silence, i reminded you I was just a parenthesis.
“this is what i mean, you don’t know real from preconceptions. you see me in the water, and you tell me you dislike it, and now you’re covered with the sea, felt its pulse and the quickness in your heart never occurred. you have distaste for what you don’t know, not the sea. we are the ebb and flow of the sea, it surrounds us, it breathes us in”, i told you as our hands fell together.
“you can never see things for what they are, can you? i am what non-fiction is. i need tangibility. i can see the ocean at my feet, i can feel it. i know what it is, my dislike is not a lack of understanding, its preempted when i want to hold it in my hands, and the sea, it falls through too easily. its all so simple for you, you don’t need the realm of being, which is where I exist”.
the outcome is always the same when it comes to this argument. the ocean falls from my eyes, and the syllables fall from my mouth.