Some loves are thick and rich and filling.

Others shatter you. They leave you attempting to collect the fragmented bits of yourself.

Either way, it’s not easy to write about love: to describe its various afflictions and victories. It’s not easy to see the good in heartbreak.

I believe the best way to own your pain is to use it for good, to dance with it, write with it, allow it to become a muse.

~

Rain-strewn streets that smell faintly of our decay. Crisp biting autumn, juicy apple air. Voluptuous springing blossoms. May holiday breeze. Seasonality is irrelevant because every second I’m transported to you. Your arms, or lack of your arms, or your presence, or your absence—but you’re there. Some part of you is there or not there, but either way you’re there.

Your fingerprints everywhere, blacklit and dirty on my slowly scarring soul. For a second I thought I was kinder. I thought I was kinder, I thought I was better and more whole, and running toward something and instead of away from something. Just for a second.

Sam Smith on the stereo and King’s Road and that was one of my favorite memories. I’ll hold you in my sleep until the day I draw my last breath and I’ll roll over to face your melon flesh—my toes graze yours between cool, clean sheets I beat dry.

Will I always be yours, even now when you’re no longer mine and we don’t know one another? You could be an entirely different person now but I know that’s not true. But in theory…you could be. We don’t speak, we don’t acknowledge, we’re as good as dead to one another in the natural realm.

Supernaturally it’s an entirely different tune. I dance around your memory, glittery tapping shoes and too much of a good thing. The kitchen floor was always kind of sticky.

Remember that time I fell in that weird bath-shower in the Airbnb we rented? My arm was black and purpling for weeks, and sickly. Sickly, I loved it because I got to remember you every time I felt its ache. I felt desolate and alone but I felt full of your love—and what was I running from when I catapulted toward you?

And today, right now cotton candy skies and memories of string sugar spun into threads I can’t unwind.

Right now, airplanes and memories and haunted.

Author: Sellers Grantham

Image: Courtesy of Author

Editor: Catherine Monkman