Heat Wave

In the middle of kissing you and a heat wave, I become grateful that you don’t write about me, that you don’t write at all. I am terrified of the horror in my own history, the trail of bodies I have left, the number of teeth I have pulled from your skull, the times you told me you loved me and I looked away, out the window.

How would you put me into words, what will you whisper to the women who come after me, who ask you where you learned to kiss like that? My body is a map of a hometown you’ve never left. My collarbones are a cellar in which you’ve been locked your entire life. You have never seen the sun.

And this is how I write about you: cruelly.
I have written about the times I’ve left you cold and shaking, the times I’ve told you that everything you are was not enough.

I haven’t quite found the words for the way your broad shoulders curve when you pull me towards you, against the solidity of your chest. The words are shelter, solidity, safety; I can write them now.

There was the time I wrote about shoving you away from me, sitting down at my kitchen table and forcing you to watch me take off my fingernail polish because, while you was kissing me sweetly, I’d imagined myself sinking a kitchen knife into your chest.

I never told anyone nor made any record of the way you looked at me the morning I made myself breakfast in front of you so I didn’t have to swallow pills meant to keep me empty on an empty stomach. I didn’t even write about how much I hated you for a week, hated that we could have ruined our futures, hated that I would have named it after my great-grandfather if it were a boy. I never even whispered to my best friend how you wore your guilt like a scarlet letter and your fear seeped through your fingers when you tried to touch my shoulder and I, scared enough already, turned away.

My diary doesn’t even know about the times we’ve driven up above the city and you let me tell you I’d burn it to the ground. Nor does it know about kissing you in thunderstorms, driving you home when we had to pull over twice so you could vomit vodka and you called me beautiful. My diary doesn’t even know your name.

But I have written about changing the radio in your car and snapping my gum and trying to keep you from telling me anything. I have written about kissing you in an elevator three states away. And running, always have I written about running away from you.
And I have written about the other man, the one who swims below the surface of every drunk conversation I have with you, Ahab’s white whale of obsession, rearing his head above the water and flashing his terrible teeth at your sails from time to time.

I have never written the truth.

I haven’t written about the way your skin tastes like salt in the middle of a heat wave and kissing me, when I am grateful you’ve never read the things I’ve written about you and you’re asking if the look on my face means I’m sad.

I send you out into the burning city, sit down, and reach for a pen.