End of August
On the past & its bruises, splinters, and home
I. It’s the end of August again and time has been cruel in its passing which is to say I have never been good at being left behind.
II. I am always trying to go back. This incompletes me.
III. You were always a curb taller than me, even when we were kids.
IV. Something in that lake is still sleeping after all these years, something under the soil welcomes me home when I go back there.
V. I have always been prone to picking scabs; I’ve been thinking too much about when you told me of the night you spent in the hospital when you couldn’t breathe. I’ve been thinking too much about how I went cold when I was born and barely made it back and for so many years I thought it bound us to each other, this looming thing, not a hand-me-down but a hand-me-over that was given to us, I gave to you, you gave to me.
VI. Under a sliced moon we held our respective, age-old deaths in our hands and tried to look each other in the eyes, keeping the missing between us. The missing that felt sacred, this unspoken yearning to go home, home where we were wrenched back from, home where we’d never see the stars and home where you’d never hear your mother call you by the childhood nickname you always hated and home where I’d never hear my mother call me by the childhood nickname I’ve always loved.
VII. When I say I will never love anyone the way I loved you again, I don’t mean that I loved you in a bigger-than-anything way, I don’t mean I loved you in a romantic, die-for-you way. I mean that I’ve tried to hold my age old death in my hands again and again, hold it between myself and someone and nobody has been able to look me in the eyes. I mean that between us, wanting to go home felt like something we were always meant to do. When I say I will never love anyone the way I loved you again, I mean that I keep wondering if you’d still be a curb taller than me, even now. I mean that I’m still writing about you. I mean that I have always been prone to picking scabs but this is one I keep coming back to, time and time again, to watch it bleed.
VIII. You are too much like your father, or the version of him I met through your rage. I am too little like either of my parents that I have no one to blame it on.
IX. I wonder if you still have splinters from all the ends of Augusts like I do, if you’ve left them to push deeper into skin and bone, if you can’t bear to take them out because you need something to remember it by like I do.
X. I am always trying to go back. This undoes me.
That’s all for now, take care of yourself
this is so, so beautiful.
❤️