treatswords

Remember my red nails all over you?

Slipping your shirt from your head, messy hair.

Your rib cage large, my fingers feeling in between their cracks, searching for something red and beating.

I never found it, and neither did you.

You wore a red sweatshirt that entire winter. I think you wanted to show you had a heart. If it didn’t exist within, at least you could roll red sleeves up.

Long blue veins stringing up your arm. I wondered at times if I played them, pick pulling against soft tissue, what song would come from you?

Something blue because that’s where you felt most comfortable.

Beneath a shadow, flicking a light switch off.

The darker the better.

Blue pen ink, I wrote you a letter that summer, slipping it into your mailbox in front of your banana-colored house. Peeling from the July heat wave, wishing you’d slip on it so that I could finally have a moment of stillness to express how you made me feel.

The ink melted in that tin box. The paper turning light blue.

I’m not sure you ever read it.

Or maybe you did, and this was your way to torture me.

Making me think my words were trapped in stale air.

That summer I drove by often, hoping to catch a glimpse of you outside.

One time I did spot you, mowing your lawn.

Bare back, jeans bellow your belly button, a towel hanging from your back pocket.

I wished for a moment to be the grass, the blade that stuck to your sweaty heal, the one that clung on until you slipped into bed. Lingering beneath your sheets, the dark and warm place you were the most vulnerable.

But you didn’t bring women like me there. The ones that poked at your soft spots, leaving small indents.

You only invited the ones who would leave in the morning.

Sun coming up, grabbing her clothes, changing in a hurry before heading out the door, never even taking a glance back your way.

I wonder if you thought of me that fall, when the leaves changed too much for the trees, so they decided to leave.

Had we outgrown one another from the start?

You were so tall, but I always felt taller.

Peering down at you but pretending we were the same size.

I think we could have reunited then, right before Thanksgiving.

I could feel a window in you open, red paint inside.

Had you painted just for me?

You left your window open until late December, but I never came.

I became green, not like the grass beneath your feet, but my own kind.

The pine needles that are un-phased by the changing of the seasons.

A large green fur settled deep in the woods.

My roots keeping me from you.