Please

Being with you is a lot like watching a pornographic documentary on ghosts. Graphic and hard and so unbearably artificial that I can almost hear ball joints cracking every time you shift; yet, at the same time, brief and fleeting and so deliberately vague that you can almost tell yourself that it didn’t happen afterwards. And slightly voyeuristic, though not enough to make you blush like a schoolgirl, but enough for you to feel like a child in a whorehouse, with a burning sense of fatal misplacement at the bottom of his stomach.

Which I had always blamed on the water.

I still remember the first time I peered into the glowing strings of your heart, flashing all pretty and red in the blank iris of my eye. And I recall wanting to wrap my fingers around the pulsing muscles tugging gently upon the shining threads until they fell into a heap in my lap, unraveled and glittering, like Christmas wrappers shining under synthetic lights. And I had wanted to tangle myself in them, tying them around my joints like puppet strings and then free falling into the pit of your pounding heart.

Which I had hoped would enclose me in its sultry depths.

The sky was hanging low and weeping the day you pressed your lips onto the pale velvet of my neck and hissed petty confessions into my ear on the training grounds. And it was among the blades of grass stained deep with sweat and blood that I took you, a clumsy affair, full of jumbled limbs smooth and slippery-soft with the scent of sex and desperate-hot lips kissing feverishly over the planes of our bodies. And both of us savoring the echos of heated lust and passion ringing through the dense, emerald forests and hazy, incoherent thoughts and jerking, trembling body.

Which reeked of unfaithfulness and betrayal for a week afterwards.

You had gathered your clothes silently that evening, the sun dipping behind the veil of mountains and clouds, and left with only a friendly but strained farewell dripping from your lips. And I sat, desolate and abandoned, with my rumbled clothes fitting oddly over the curves of my body, on the hills, letting the empty solitude expand and press against the dull throbbing of my heart. Somewhere in the horizon, I saw a flock of birds fleeing into the bloodied fever of the sunset, and counted them one by one as they were shot down by hunters with slings and stones.

Which threaded through my body, landing squarely between my ribs, and barely missing my heart.

By the fourth week, I’ve realized that your heart is no longer pulsing with tendrils of thick string wrapped seductively around muscle. There were no lights, no blindingly brilliant yarn to untangle and spin about my fingers idly during the dark of the night. I found you barren and empty and utterly stripped, with nothing left but a dense and impermeable lump of a heart left bobbing in the cavity of your ribcage. And I supposed that it was because you had given it all to him, your body, your secrets, and your love.

Which I had chased after so eagerly through the years.

But I still stayed with you, molding myself into your body night after night atop sprawled cotton bedding, hoping to return the warmth back into your sad, ghostflower-ridden eyes. And I stayed to press my raw and angled ribs against yours, coaxing your chest to open and let me sink into the damp and salty abyss of your sorrows. And I stayed because--

You had set me free on that day so long ago. You had opened my cage and told me to fly.

But there was nowhere that I wanted to fly to but the soft and sweet nest of your heart.

So open up your ribcage, and ensnare me in the bars of your weeping and crippled and sinking--

Please.