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November 11, 2009
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I Giorni
And I remember that night - O God, the soft black heat of that night. I remember your warm pink flesh and my fingers on it, feeling each tiny hair as I counted the colours still in your eyes by the yellow light that slept above the curtains.
I can feel the stillness of that night on the back of my neck even now; I know it only in my cold skin, kissed by the grey lips of winter instead of the pink rose at your mouth. My glass is cold between my teeth where your tongue had warmed me. The first of many.
It could have rained that night, or snowed, or blood could have wept from the sky as we lay together in that single bed that knew, I’m sure, many loves apart from ours. This bed here is softer, but the sky is still, as that night was; soft and black as that night was, but oh so cold. I have not known warmth since I knew your arms.
October 10, 2009
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I retreated for a piss, and the sight of myself in the mirror nearly made me give up all hope. The lines cutting up my face were nothing new, but the black crescent moons under my eyes had worsened considerably since I’d gotten rid of all the mirrors in my flat, like some self-loathing vampire.
September 20, 2009
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I blew off dinner with my movie-star ex to stay home, hold a pillow to my chest in my dark bed, and imagine that in my arms and in the depths of me, there was you.
September 12, 2009
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I was just a kid then, but that meant nothing to her. She wore war paint and six rings, and her hair was like burning lava on her back. Two nights a week, I drank deep of her cup at her insistance; woke cold in the blue light of day, alone in her arms as she read the Tarot.
She drew the Death card, but I was still a child, running between parked cars with open arms.
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I was nineteen, fresh out of the past, when I went on a roadtrip with the Devil.
I had no future (not then, anyway) and he approached me like some old guy in a bar with only one thing on his mind. It’s all the same anyway, I figured then, and I think the same way now - but at the time I wasn’t figuring anything just yet because my head was full of his voice. He sounded like a dying man who was never going to die.
He said, “Is that your car out front? The Cortina.” And I said that it was, though it was in fact my brothers, who was dead then but now lives just outside the city in a flat with a blond.
The Devil - well, this old guy who turned out to be the Devil, although not until that night in this rotting B&B, where the flowery sheets smelt like a morgue - asked where I was going, and when I said I didn’t know, he asked for a ride.
September 8, 2009
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I said, ‘Do you fancy going to the Lighthouse tomorrow?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Okay.’
We spent a whole day there, eating sandwiches and watching the sun move across the sky, with out feet on the rocks and our eyes like lights upon the sea.
September 7, 2009
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I slept almost every night for a year and a half with my hand on the back of his neck. It wasn’t controlling, nor was it protective - I just loved to wake up with the softness of short, lightly curling, brown hair on my fingertips.
September 6, 2009
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I’d heard it was haunted long before I met him, with his pallid eyes and his lips tarnished the purple of cheap wine. I grew up with the stories, since it was in the area I lived in as a child, and come of age in as a teenager.
We all knew them and he knew them too, though he’d grown up with enough distance from the place in question - from the facts - that he was able to create his own myths about the whole thing. And mostly I knew he was right.
September 5, 2009
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She had a hip-to-waist ratio like the ocean in a storm, and her lips were pink as a daiquiris.
I watched her as she flagged a bus from the otherside of the road, just an anonymous nobody imagining ink stains left by her bottle-black hair on my torso.
