ink

Flashes. The flashbacks are so acute some times. I'm driving and suddenly my senses are in chicago. Night. Him, to my left, always left, and my heart, beating. Why in all the years my heart has remained cold had it chosen to wake to someone so undeserving and irreverent of such great weight? But I woke in Chicago, for once I broke down the games my subconscious devises to keep my eyes turned outwards, abandoned the practice of keeping things at a distance and wanted to love. I close my eyes and the smell, the air and the sound of the car and I'm in Chicago, I feel echos of what it was like to have my heart alive and breaking and I shudder and feel a icy touch creep through my body as if the memory has entered my blood, fresh with the chill of the snow and air outside the windows those nights. It haunts me. I am so stoic and unmovable, oceans of feeling break against me and I feel nothing but that dull echo through numbed scar tissue and I stay, incapable and unwilling to feel, a rock in the waves. What a strange feeling to be reminded of being at the mercy of another, to feel my heart sting like a living, breathing creature instead of the cold circuit it has been resigned to. To remember when I hurt. To remember when I was the one pouring my blood before an alter to immobility. Before I was like him.

Oh, for unhealed wounds. It matters so much and so little and it so easy yet hard to repair. The need for release grapples with the symptoms of the wound and I cannot cry, cannot explain in words the injury because I do not love you. I cannot love you. Il a l'fait. He has made it so I cannot love you. I cannot heal because I cannot speak or cry or feel it anymore unless you're with me and I love you. But I let the boys fall in love with me and then realize I cannot understand their feelings, I cannot relate and I cannot find anything in them worthy of that heavy pain I bore would take to wake again. It is not a choice, being without love. To be touched by those who are beautiful and feel only what my nerves tell me. I was transformed in the winder, in chicago. I took it in, the breaths in the cold air borne to my blood and crept to the core. I keep it there, a photo memory of the time place and circumstance of the death of things and I keep moving so it will not swallow me whole. The flight has taken me far, far, far and cost me money, friends, lovers, and most of all time. Years of my life tossed to air to avoid the feeling that haunts me tonight.

Alone in my car and I'm in chicago. I remember it by the cold in my blood and the echo of feeling alive cast against the absolute stillness I've lived within since. An echo in silence rips through the ears like a gunshot, and I am overwhelmed.