Brad,
We tiptoed around dusty crates at the attraction, perhaps a carnival or hidden market, the light indicative of a secret withheld. Brown bottle glass, antique mirrors. I would have forgotten your name, if it was one you'd ever told me.
There was so much life that happened to me before I realized I could distill this down to the single sentence: we fucked on the couch and it my first time. I, as usual, wish I had saved some of that life so there could be more understanding of the process, but maybe the process doesn't matter, and didn't matter even then.
I knew it was a memory, but at the time I knew that ironically, like growing a new memory over the old ones I was handed by circumstance is a terribly passe thing these days and can be ignored as easily as refusing to acknowledge anymore remixes. Maybe the process is just as easily summed up by saying it's the same song, but different.
This could've been a poem if I was a different part of myself - the part maybe that sees poetry as a weapon instead of the pattering mortar of words which feels like an arsenal but ultimately moves little. If you push me around, I'll move. Justified down to the last pawn on the board; if you push me around, I'll move.
I'm mad because the dream happened, and like anything else, it makes sense only after the fact and maybe 20 years before, but no time in between. And I loved you.
No, that isn't what I was going to say. I was going to say I kept the love I felt for you a secret from everyone, and that's why we were never going to be together. I can never tell when I'm talking about you or thinking about you, if anything I think or feel is real. I don't know how this part of me works, and being close to you at all means I have a whole other half I might use to undermine it in the first place. I think this whole thing could be really funny if I wanted it to be, but I don't.
I don't know what to do with this slice of time anymore, not after I beat it to death to analyze where everything turned from good to bad. Not after I discovered I could never be a princess for you, accepted that forever, donned pair after pair of thigh-high fishnets to spite you, tried to grow up without you, felt like such a fucking disappointment to you, refused to ever trust you, cursed you loudly and often, only to wake up, Brad, to fucking wake up in the ash after the blast because you kissed me and a thousand years had gone by in the blink of your slick red time machine.
I wanted to be angry with you for this distinctly adamic maneuver, tying something up in me with a bow to present it back to myself like what's been in your pocket for the last 20 years was this puzzle piece. I wanted to be angry but at the same time, I was too relieved. Relieved that you had it, and relieved that you had it.
I can't remember really how we got here, except we fell in love the other night, and it felt like something unrelenting colliding with something unwarranted. So I find myself under you again, tangling into your hair, begging you not to stop again and forgetting what the both of us have always known.
I loved fucking you the first time because I could feel how my body belonged to you and no one else. It feels like that every time since.
I can't remember how we got here, but the slide passes from one side of the carousel to the other with a metallic sound, pushing one photograph over in favor of the next. Once, we were at summer camp, once we were orphaned killers, once we were newlyweds absconded from the law, once you took me to see how the world began, and now this. Now this, we lay on the grass in borrowed clothes and wonder what just happened to us.
But we couldn't know all the attendees of the wedding would be vaporized the next day in the power of the blast of the house exiting this atmosphere. We couldn't know it was their graves you picked through to propose. We couldn't know what it would take to marry my heart to yours, being unflaggingly the same.
I have to tell you, I lied to you so much when we were young because I was afraid of meaning the things I said. I promise I'll never lie to you again.
Love always,
Janet
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