Bodies of Water
There is always a night when you decide you need to move on.
And mother, mark my words,
because when I die I will go to wherever you are because that shall be my heaven,
And then, I will be yours.
But now, now that I am here,
I must be theirs.
I did not know that everything was so perfectly set into place all those years back,
For back then, places were vapid and so was my mind,
because any room that was not filled with your perfume or the smell of his chewing gum was empty.
And him,
You know who he was, right?
I know who he was.
Mother, he was a boy that I know more than I will ever know you.
Oh, you know my words are fuelled by air, not remorse.
Mother,
Oh mother,
My lungs have only known the temptation of oxygen since the first day he took my breath away.
You know me.
You know I would never dive into an ocean to drown;
He pushed me in.
And I know what day he did it on.
He spoke of blame,
And I can’t blame him for doing so,
Because if I did I would be adding drops to his own ocean,
And he would drown.
He was fragile,
But not feeble,
The word feeble suggests a lack of vigor,
And mother,
That boy did not lack one inkling of strength in his body.
He remembers as much of that man as I remember of you;
A smile, a word,
The press of fingertips as they ran over an old letter.
My letters were for you.
Every night I would wrap myself in blankets until I could move nothing but one arm,
And taking a deep breath,
I sunk myself once again into the waters of you,
A sea that until this day I cannot bear to walk away from.
He used to speak of his family,
This fragile, glassy-eyed soldier,
This child trapped in an adult’s body,
Whose fingertips grazed a stack of letters every night.
It was always the same –
To: Gale Jones
From: A sorry father
On: January 2010, February 2010, March 2010,
Son, I need to talk to you,
I need to wrap my words around your throat,
I need to choke you with guilt and pull your body up above,
So my toes can touch the floor again.
Our conversations were not composed of introductions,
And bodies,
And conclusions;
We spoke on tangents,
For if we attempted to stay on one line,
He soon find himself tracing curves,
Over the lines of my past,
Over the scars of something that others dare say no longer exists.
You exist, mother.
You exist in the same way that he exists,
And when I write letters I write to both of you in unison,
Because either I’m a teenager filled with post-traumatic stress disorder,
And childhood nostalgia, and words in my throat,
Or I’m a pathetic lover.
I have not one option which is not already sprinkled with their pity.
So, this night,
This night I keep on hiding from my readers,
This night I feed on in a hidden alley somewhere along with
all these hidden tangents only he knows of,
This night is filled with regret.
They all refer to regret as being about wishing it had not happened,
Or had happened more.
And this is not the case.
Maybe I do not regret the night,
But I regret the body of water it sinks me in,
The body that I hold when I’m lonely,
Just as he holds his pillows at night.
Just as you hold every particle of water in the Pacific Ocean.
This night I will keep to myself.
And tuck it away,
Under the folds of Jethro’s envelopes,
Under the feathers of my wings as I fly away from this place,
That I deemed to call a home for too long.
One night,
One night I will do it.
I will run my fingertips over every single page we wrote,
I will walk barefoot on the cobblestones of a world
We’re all making for ourselves somewhere in the fucked up areas of our minds.
One night,
I will run my fingers over his every inch,
I do not care if it’s his body,
Or his words,
Or the thoughts he thought on the night he did it,
But I will.
I will not be feeble,
But mother,
You weren’t either.
One night you had a night like the night he had,
And the night I will have for him.
But mother, the night he had for me,
Was the night I knew I’d be like you,
And mother,
Oh mother,
You drowned.