Quenched

An Elegy

I want you to know that I’m not ok.

I want you to know that since you’ve gone, I’ve re-stacked the deck of our relationship in my favor; won every argument, re-litigated every misplaced question and contradiction in terms. Turned every other cheek.

I want you to know that the first time I fucked someone after you, I couldn’t come without the memory of you; haunted by your fingers in my hair in my mouth my tongue sliding me sweetly open and around you.

That first time after you, I want you to know the way my fists pounded on the vault of my memory while a stranger pounded into the vault of me, and the moment I let a bit of you eke out of it I came - shattered; coming turning sour as spilt milk into weeping and I wanted nothing more than to punish you with knowing it.

Fuck you.

I miss you.

Come back.

I want you to know that I spent a week watching a candle burn down pretending it was you. Talking to it low and soft. As if I could wean myself into letting go.

But still, I want you to know I’m not ok.

You told me once that when you fell in love with me a whole other chamber of your heart opened up, one just for me and no one, not even me could ever touch that.

It can’t be true I said, when they told me what happened. It can’t. It can’t. Because he told me I was in there and if I was in there, wouldn’t I have saved him?

I wanted to be there.

In your heart.

I wanted to press my arms out against the slick, pulsing womb of it and fortify it up. You can’t be gone if I’m still here. Not if I was in there, holding up the walls of your over-full heart. Please tell me that’s how much I matter.

Show me.

Show me that love is just another word for important.

A kind of wanting that feels like a warning and still somehow tainted with that bitter colonial edge of mine.

Please tell me how not to lose you.

Every gesture of my body is asking to hold onto something certain, reckoning with the utter impossibility, the comedic collapse of any well-made play or someone’s just desserts.

The truth is that I want to hold my longing as long as this body will let me. Because it is the last I have left of you, in me.

I want to feel unsated by you so that I can always, always ask for more.

I want to drip for days for you and still not be quenched.