ALINA IS TO APRIL, AS BLOOD IS TO POWER

ALINA IS TO APRIL, AS BLOOD IS TO POWER

Fall into me, fall out of me, trip onto this page, find your haven between my teeth.

I will put on my shirt and leave you to your life. Say the word and I will take my love with me.

I’ll be going to where that great Ocean meets the River, where the trees of the forest have homes built into their branches, and when you rest inside them you will see every dream God has ever had since the beginning of It all. You will sleep in that cave and you will discover how similar you are to God. You will discover that you dream the same. That you are the same.

I have two lovers, Charlie and April, they walk with me on either side. Sometimes I wonder what it must be like to be left out at Sea with nothing but the salt between your teeth, what it must be like to devour your tongue and still be able to scream for your mother, what it must be like to feel so lost within those waters that you almost wonder if drowning is the gateway to paradise, if beneath the water is where Heaven truly resides, and God is that Great Whale trailing your life raft asking you to close your eyes and sink.

I wonder that, sometimes.

I thought that the girl who I loved had four tattoos. Two on her arms, two on the insides of her thighs. The same ones that rested between my teeth as we entered into one another that same night that changed everything. I thought that she spoke slowly, that she had hazel eyes you could literally fall into. I thought that she walked down the main street of our shared hometown with her hair covering her eyes and her music playing loudly. I thought that she drank every Wednesday during the happy hour of the coffee shop that serves beer, the same one in which we always find ourselves meeting again, ordering tall glasses of beer that she chips away at steadily as we sit across from one another. I thought that her name was Alina and that she was the girl who I have loved since I was fifteen, since I first saw her walking through the halls of that shit high school like she owned the place, who I kissed two weeks after my brother wrecked his body in a car crash, that girl who I refused to ever stop carrying a torch for. But I was wrong.

The girl I love is dead: as in, she never existed in the confines of flesh and blood. As in, the girl I love is named April, a name she gave herself, spoken through my tongue, and she lives within the strings of my guitar, she is the bottom of these coffee cups, the ones I drink irritably as I attempt to bring her to life, pushing her out of me and onto the page, exorcising her out of a body that doesn’t exist, forcing her out of the haven she occupies between the salt of my teeth. And when she reveals herself, she attaches herself to my shadow, or rather I to hers, and we walk barefoot through the snow until our feet bleed red. Alina, the girl who has other love besides mine rolling through her chest, is not the love that I thought. She lives within her own body, and that makes all the difference in the world. I have thought all of this time that April was another name for Alina, the name I used in poetry to reference this supposed love, but I have discovered it as another name for myself. April is to Alina, as blood is to power. They are the same, but eternally different.

 At 20, I threw myself into the river at the height of June, going faster than I could ever swim, thinking that I could make it to the other side easily. It swept me away, trapping me in its jaws until I couldn’t breathe, and my flesh felt as if it might be torn from my body. If that same river hadn’t slammed me into a log jutting out from the shore, a log upon which I pulled myself up from death, I have no doubt that I would have died in the name of my own delusion. And for what? For the love of a spirit already living behind my eyes, already breathing through my lungs. I wrote love song after love song, breaking the bones of my hands open upon my pen, but somehow finding new ways to hold them together in prayer, all in the name of April’s love. Only she has never existed any place other than my body. She has never existed anywhere other than the salt of my tongue, between the salt of my teeth.

I love her. I am her. Or she is me. Or we are each other. Or she is the shadow and I am the body, or she is the light and I am her follower, or we are both lost within each other and no one is the leader, all I know is that she does not have body, as much as I don’t have a body, or we have both lost our bodies, and are bleeding together in the snow. All I know is that she is not that same girl with that cat and the tattoo of a mockingbird singing the blues who I slept with the final weekend of summer, the girl who takes her alcohol often and dangerously, who sips down those happy hours like she’s tearing away at her insides for a reason. She is not the girl with the plant watering business, nor the one who will be going to jail for a week in a month from this date. But I am still the boy who she’s known in so many ways it’s hard to even keep track of all of them. I am still the shadow. Only now, we are both the body.

Only now, we are both bodiless, floating empty inside the Sea.