Anything to make you smileWritten across my knuckles in Caleb's neatly printed script with a sharpie from his big wooden desk in the other room.
You are the ever-living ghost of what once was
I never want to hear you say
That you'd be better off
Or you liked it that way
But no one is ever gonna love you more than I do
No one's gonna love you more than I do
OBLIVION
I'm wondering if it will last through a few more showers so I don't forget, ironically. Maybe if it washes off soon I'll have it written again on my forehead instead because that's what they read when they look at me. Forgets everything. The slights, the betrayals, the violence, the struggle.
(Forget history, forget the present and forget about the future, for now, baby.
Live in your sweet circus fugue and everything will be okay. Life is a big-top cotton-candy bubble for you, the outside can't touch you, the inside won't stop, and you can make as many rules as you like and paint them, numbered on a huge wooden board that you prop up by the entrance and we'll read it and then serve to ignore or break every last one.
For you.
Because that's the way you wanted it. Your needs are like the tide, always shifting. In and out. Aquamarine dreams, froth disguised as rapid eye movement, twitching, aching limbs from paddling against the current. Scattered, random waves.)
He watched us last night because Ben allowed nothing more, the correction for changing my appearance without permission, reparations for scaring me so badly and yet staying away is something I can't seem to accomplish at all and so I am brought, vaguely tranquilized on wine and unsteady. Undressed, given a marker and license to let go of my thoughts on their flesh, assent to print blame should I want to, or make promises to be tattooed. I remember distinctly writing I wish you were Cole down Caleb's muscled left arm. I remember writing don't leave me on Ben's impossibly-broad back where he would never find the conscious of my self. I remember nothing more than landing in the soft sheets after that, Ben's arms around me, the way I like life best. I no longer held the marker. The lights of the city were the last thing I saw.
I turn over and gaze out the window. I am upside down, facing the windows and therefore, the water. Ben sleeps easily beside me, rightside up. Caleb is nowhere to be found. I trace the letters on my fingers and turn my hands palms up. I love you is written on each one in my own handwriting. I am surprised by that, and pleased.
It is a first.