Wade

You are coughing up salt water.
Hands clasped for respite,
knees bruised for breath.
You’ve chosen mortality and now live as a shipwrecked ghost
bearing a lonely shame (duller than before);
this confounding embarrassment creeps into your lungs
as you float in corrupted daylight.

Remember when you’d whisper with your best friend until your chest became heavy and your spine melted into the floor.
Mid-sentence, you’d drift off, and He’d bring the seafoam sheets all the way up, allowing it to just brush your chin, then folded it back.
You’d lay sound.
Because soaking in your inky your vile your id,
He’d stroke your nose loyally (goodness is about intention).

It’s easy to be golden when someone will romanticize you on your own terms
(this white-wash leaves only a violet stain behind).
And goodness is about intention.

Well, intimates are flawed and neither is faultless!
You are not as forgiving, are not as permissive, not as blissful,
not naïve
as He needs
–Couldn’t he have prevented this?
For both your sakes?

Your throat is burning and your eyes weigh your gaze under.
It’s like your body is punishing you for abandoning Him
in a sick sort of excited way.

You’ve reclaimed the hair on your skin the skin on your muscles the muscles on your bones
yet linger in an identity still only half yours.
Your stomach seizes when you remember you are not the girl He used to love,
you are not a girl you can love, you are not girl, are not love,
so I wish to feel nothing and to think nothing and to be
Nothing
because Nothing is more tangible than a memory (ah, to pine after translucence).

Sometimes, you dream about wiggly teeth and Mulholland Madness.
Sometimes, wide-eyed, you wonder at what temperature we lose thermal sensation, not that it will ever matter, even if you wonder aloud.
And when blinking in black,
You are hollow, well-aware, too aware, no one is listening.

Remember you
would whisper leg
intertwined.
Pausing when a floorboard creaked (Shh).
Only when your heart
re-melded would your voice give in to the wear,
and
stroked the tip of your nose to between your eyebrows.
Up and down, up
and down, until you woke up.
Blunt nail up, soft underbelly down, up and down.
Your body your thoughts your being entrusted to
hypnotic consistency.
Goodness is about intention.

You go up
and down,
head lolling,
watching some children wade in.