The lines I want to write, the sentiment I want to convey, is how uncanny it is that you walk among the living. That I’ve already written the story of you and yet you move about, and with such dimension you seem as real as when I loved you. Back when you were crested and flew, a white crow. 

In one year, I forgot you in my body, and I knew I would–that’s why I cried such loud grief. Because I loved you so much. You drenched me. You clothed me in the robes of worship.

I pressed myself like a summer violet between the pages of one chapter and prayed to be archived, but the pages kept turning. We made love back then, and when we fucked again years later I felt your body ask for forgiveness.

You came before I could reject the request, but I saved your question in a vial. 

That feeling, the one you opened and then you closed with your departure, the one where I was born to swell and then juice your thirst, the one of marriage, though it is still rippling toward the shoreline, has expelled its grand tumult.

That pain is a framework now.

Not about you anymore, really. You couldn’t wound me if you appeared in the doorway beaming with devilish sunshine. Supposedly this has something to do with my mother and my father, or to do with theirs and theirs and theirs.

I felt it until I married, and then, delighted by my obedience and blind, I didn’t. And when I was again not a wife, I realized how truly drab I had felt the whole time. The cursed symbol was gone, and in its place the exhaustive exposition, a pot of bubbling, boring meal.

Porridge, unless I could magic some seasoned meat, the oily eyes of a fish, patches of beautiful berries through my senses, and cream through my mouth.

Or make do with garlic and turnip.

And that’s that, really. A wound as purple and bottle green and deeply mean as mine of yours has to throb terribly, like a situated thorn and like a slow pleasure.

Any intensity in its extreme when loved feels heavenly, and when it goes burns a funerary mark in an impossible shape. I can’t twist myself into the right position to look at it, and no one knows what it means.

I can’t commune with it, but it looms, so much so that I have to show it to everyone I meet.