Do you remember the promises? And the kisses of skin that linked us to the shifting days? Remember me, please, as I lay watching myself die in our mirror. The apartment always seemed too big when you walked away and my heart, growing week in the years following your steps, until the day came and we were told my heart was too weak to be given away to hold. Make sure they put down sadness as cause of death. We know it won’t be from any other disease that causes me to break my promise of loving you till your last breath. Kiss me now before you catch your death, so what lingers isn’t shadow, but infliction, trauma. Too bruised for anyone to understand what I would give to die with your soul on my breath. Untouchable as we may seem, with the sunlight revealing rumpled sheets, and indented pillows, reveling in their current disarray.

I always felt you tasted sweeter under the noon-day light, glowing from my appraisals you, who took darkness from sex and thrust it against the kitchen counter before clearing the table that one day will become a child’s desk. Your child, whom I thought couldn’t look more beautiful inside the swell of your skin, until the blue eyes greeted me on that unassuming October-day. Those blue eyes will ask me, one day, what love is. And I, having studied words will only be able to hand over your picture, before returning to mind. Flashes of what once was, what could be, drowning effortlessly in what currently is. I, you, we, forgot freedom when what has us trapped makes the snake wonder what really was in that apple.

For we have forgiven what hasn’t been argued, and love what can’t be forgotten, as firm skin sinks into aged flesh that still shudders in anticipation as the desk becomes a table again.