Between Moments

“I love you.” Hands touched hands and we became one. It wasn’t in the movement or the rhythm that stitched us together or the glances. Just in the simple intertwining of fingers followed by echoes of pants, the unison breaths. It was a click, a moment where I lost myself completely. I was sure you did too, so sure. You whispered it too, a few seconds after.

“I love you too.”

Maybe I heard wrong. Maybe it was just an echo, slipping out of your tongue. Maybe it was a mistake, because after that click, we didn’t do anything special. We didn’t get married, you didn’t propose. I would have said yes. I always wondered if you knew how much I loved you, there is a lot more I wonder about now. Like if there was a different you didn’t ask. Now has a terrible way of tainting of was. Each touch, each caress, is stained at the edges. We’ve cut each other so deep. You did it as a distraction, after your leg something in you had died, I still don’t know exactly what it was that they cut out that day. But Greg you can’t just keep cutting and cutting without scars. Look at me now. I’m just your scar, not even my own damn self.

Baltimore was hell dressed up like heaven. I will never forgive you for that. You consumed me, melted me and left me to harden. Don’t you see that you weren’t preventing anything be keeping your own misery. I want to be happy, is that a crime? I was happy with you. I want to remember it but I can’t. I just can’t remember why I love you, but I can’t stop. This is my disease don’t you see we had it diagnosed all along. Why even bother coming in an MRI can’t pick it up. No machine can see the echoes of heartbreak or sense of the rhythm of pain. There is no stress test to measure each breath between he’s gone and he’s back again. You are my heartbeat House, my pulse. You fade and you crescendo, but you never promised to be dependable.

Watch my heart stop, and my brain cells scream.

Beep. Beep.

--

Dying was like living between moments. The pain ate away at thought and I was just left with images and fear. Between the black and white gradients interspersed with flashes of red and orange with each new shot of pain, there was tiny slit that grew like a run in stockings. I had no fingers to outstretch I was without form, or eyes, or hands. I was just feeling and tasting colors trying to swallow every last taste of life through osmosis. I couldn’t, there was to much. Red’s slipped through my taste-buds like childhood memories through patchy photo albums. I can’t remember every birthday candle, or every kiss.

I want to but I can’t. The white slit is growing into a yawning chasm but there are no warm welcoming faces or voices just the sensations slipping away. I refuse to walk to it. Whatever my posturing I don’t die, I refuse to. But it is surrounding me. And it occurs to me that I never had a choice about this at all.

If I hadn’t left him he would leave me. If I hadn’t life it would have left me. This knowledge shakes me, or would have shaken me if there was anything left to shake. I am dissolving into this white acidic light.

There is nothing beautiful about it. And then I see it, a lean black architectural line amidst all the white, a cane. Each part of me laughs, shakes. Oh god. I don’t even get to see his face just a symbol of the hell I put him through. Then any of the mirth I can feel through the pain is gone. Is this where I am going, hell?

Oh god. Perhaps I am going nowhere at all. I have five seconds left before I denigrate. I coagulate against the black ivory of it, tiny water droplets against my sin. The pain hasn’t stopped I can feel things, my hands, my toes, my eyes that are exploding with the feeling. Is the life flowing in or out but the pain is intensifies.

In five seconds I’m going to explode.

In ten I wake up.