"My furtive friend" by Kailee M

 

 

It’s early morning, and I lie restless beneath the crack of dawn, laden with the thought of a love unwonted (because it only exists in my waking dreams). The midnight bell was torpid—crooned a dead sailor’s chord that carried through the moon-struck shadows. I haven’t slept since. My every exhalation sobs life into the stillness, like the promise of resuscitation. 

 

I write to you (I promised myself I wouldn’t) with punch-drunk fingertips and hope that you can hear me halfway across the world. 

 

*

 

These are the sounds I hear at night: running water, babbling brook, rivulet of winding scars—it manifests in tidal waves and bruised and sundered stars. They’re breathed out in an exhalation of liquid smoke in candlelight, like ghosts who cling in desperation to a watered-down conflagration of excess, and regress. There is nothing for you here, they cry. There is no promised land. Despite myself, I grasp at them, hands scraping at empty air—but they don’t want to be caught (and I no longer want to know why). Still, they beckon forth in search of a broken sky. 

 

This is my big blazing inferno: burning dust saturated with blinding, bleeding colors. It breathes in gusts, the great static of it all, and waits—even as melancholy dissolves again in the sun. So, I sit and drink my peach tea and miss something I’ve never had. 

 

In those moments, when there’s nothing left for me in the waking world, I dream of memories painted in much brighter ink. 

 

It is daybreak, sunlight filtering through the clouds and painting dew-dappled streets with bronze, carrying the warmth of a summer breeze. It is the April sky, blanketing sleepy cities with a cotton-candy hue. It is spring rain, oh-so cruelly breeding azaleas out of the withered ground to be garnered and misplaced in the breadth of an unstrung heartbeat. It is the horizon, the silver lining between dusk and the languid earth, stagnant in its lethargy but evanescent in its clarity. It is twilight, a sleepy masquerade of bravado in limpid pools of stardust that aren’t quite as bright as the undiluted moon. 

 

It is a dream, watered-down and indulgent and mercurial, because I—the casual observer—only afford a glance, a smile, a look, a breath, before it wavers between reality and intangibility, and now it’s no longer mine to think about. 

 

I wish I had the talent to let go of the past as easily as I let go of the present, because the mirror I relied on to depict the saccharine past no longer works. I’d been wholly consumed by the idea of you—too absorbed in those chardonnay eyes to notice your eldritch horns (you cannot call that love, dear shadow). You’ve left just enough memory in the wake of your maelstrom for me to put the feeling into words. It was cold insecurity, overshadowed by starlit smiles. It was derision, hiding behind kind words that were nothing more than a careful charade. It was winding, roiling, seething fear, buried in the palms of your outstretched hands. 

 

(It posits that it’s been here all along.)

 

(Hate its prose, ignore its siren song.)

 

            When I was younger, I asked myself questions I didn’t know the answers to, throwing them to the wind and hoping they’d be blown back with the secrets of the world. Now, I look up at the clock above my window, and I finally understand what it means when it says, “No guarantees.” 

 

            Goodbye, electric angel. I hope you’ll forgive me for your epitaph: Do not resuscitate the dead.

 

            You may once have been my furtive friend, but now you’re a ghost in the breeze.