Sunday, January 24, 2016

Conjure

In the early parts of the last few months, I wrote witchy words on worn parchment, asking for you to come back. Then I burned them, indigo paper feathers blown into thin mountain air. You couldn’t have known the ceremony, it was in my head. It was also in my head that it was better you were gone, eventually, as each ritual became less necessary with your assured distance and my growing disdain not for you, but for having lost you.

I floated through summer blocking the sunshine with white-rimmed shades because you are the kind of boy a girl copies, not the other way around. I wear darker colored glasses now to shield my eyes, conceal any trace of your reflection in them because surely you are imprinted there. I want no one to see the chimera I carry, including myself. So I stopped looking into my own eyes even…

You ripped off the Band-Aid too soon and though I was left bloody, the scab would eventually come by autumn. I traced its rippled colors with leaves of similar crispy crimson stock… until it was time to rake them.

I wasn’t cleansed, but winter brought cold and as snowflakes melted against my hands when I dusted the car, absent-minded ritual, a previous us frozen in time…I knew I was close. There was only a faint scar.

Then you came back. You fucking came back. You rode north on metal horse power bound for high country and the day it happened I knew without knowing. I could feel you again. I could feel myself again. I could breathe the solstice, darkest day, and smell the steam from the river Styx warming the air.

Did I conjure this?

I was suddenly brave enough to look at our happy faces together in forbidden photographs, long hidden in a desk drawer, and wonder what it would mean to see you again. How would we react? Could I keep my composure, especially if the situation presented itself in a less than ideal manner? Laugh out loud.

There could be nothing “ideal.” There never is.

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