In the morning, I will be with you.
It is okay if you sometimes want to say I-love-you’s when the clock blinks constant midnight but you are only half-awake and the words don’t come out right. You say “I’ll go where you’ll go” and yet you do not. I say I believe you and yet I do not. You stay there while I am still here and you google the distance between you and me and pretend it is not much. It is never truly accurate, not all sources are reliable, you can’t trust what you read on the Internet, but I don’t contradict you. Not anymore, or at least I try not to. I nod when you do and stay silent when you want me to. I steal so you don’t have to. I only take a third of the bed and half of the covers but you blame me for taking all the light. You complain that I wash off every bit of you when you leave but it is not true. See, I can go on for days without showering because I want the smell of you to linger on me. You say I have too many shampoo options and not enough compassion. You think it’s funny that I’ve only started writing about you now that I’ve gotten my heart broken by someone else when really, it is not new that I do. But I change subject and I ask you how many bones the human skeleton consists of. You run to the living room where I array all my books by the color of the spines on the shelving units. You look up in the blue out-dated encyclopedia and scream 206 like it was a contest, so I reply ”Well I love you with the 206 of them”. You ask me which one of yours is my favorite. It is the collarbone. You want to know why but I can’t tell. It is like when I ask you why you never stray too far for me. ”I simply do” is the best I can get. When I insist, you add “I must have been a dog in a past life”. You explain that some things simply are but I say that they will not always remain this way. It is like home, often it changes. Sometimes you say you are as free as a bird, and I want to tell you that you can’t be two animals at once, you have to pick only one, but I don’t. If you want to be a bird, then a bird you’ll be. So you move. You say it is because this is what birds usually do like it’s a well-known fact, and I am not sure if it is entirely correct but if you affirm it then it must be. You can’t stay in the right place very long, you say. You make your nest wherever you are welcome, wherever people love you. I tell you that I do best but you interrupt me. You say “No you do not, you love me the most but also the worst”. Then I tell you to let me cut wood and build you a house from tree branches but you don’t listen. These days you are a bird. I prefer you as a dog but I keep it to myself. You’d retort it is because I want to keep you on a leash and not ever see you go. You’d probably be right but I don’t like saying that either, so I don’t say anything. And sometimes when I am mad at you, I lie and yell that you remind me of your dad. And then you bang your forehead against the wall and turn into a mute and then for a moment, you remind me of myself. I turn my room into a mess so you can punish me and take me to bed where we sweat and reek of sex and flesh and salt and where eventually you forgive me. And after you’re done with the inside of my thighs, you kiss my right elbow and say that you remember me with my gapped teeth and I shelter under the pillows because I am ashamed. You tell me not to hide and I precise it is not from you and even if I don’t see you, I can hear you smile. And then you improvise us a tent that we rest under and you whisper that I am like a city that you’ve never visited but that you’d like to live in. I am not sure what you mean but I say “me too” and somehow I mean it too.
