I suppose they were always there, these thorns. I only noticed them today.
Can you be the full sort of empty? Can you glue your 16 selves into a complete and current version? Can you not entirely fall apart?
I am kind and I am patient and I am hesitant and I am ignored.
My heart has thorns. Did you know? They prick me while I sleep and all this time I thought it was you.
It hurts. Not my heart - it has the thorns after all - the soft tissue that surrounds, however, it is bleeding all over my lungs, my dreams, my throat. Red and angry and telling anyone who will listen how I was wrong.
Wrong. And stupid. Very and newly stupid. The pedestal I gave you was meant to make us taller. I have been chasing the biggest thing I know and I refuse to believe that’s not the point.
We are at breakfast. It’s been over an hour. You stop to respond to a text message. Broken from the spell of our sounds, I look around. I have not noticed the family of four to my right. Haven’t noticed the line for the bathroom snaked through the back of the diner. I become fixated on the fiberglass figure suspended from the ceiling three tables away. She is aqua. She is naked. She is mid-backflip. She is seemingly a less-referential Koons, cast-off from exhibition and deserted here, because she does not make sense; her lumbar spine is curved too much to right itself but not enough for a graceful water entry. She is confusing. I can’t take my eyes off of her.
If I were honest - completely, nakedly, unerringly honest - I would tell you that you are the only person for whom I don’t dumb down my language. That you pause when I smile and it’s the only compliment I will ever want. That I would trade every other look in the world for the one where you seem to think I hold all the light in the room. That I know there’s more to everything than the words you and I say to each other because we both have chosen the wrong ones over and over.
She is blue and she is backwards and she is in flight. And you are here and you are everything and you are wrong.
You are wrong about before. Busy is no excuse for fear. You’re wrong to continually pick the one for whom you think you can be most beneficial because it’s not about being better or worse or right.
You are the wrong person. And I am backwards and aqua and bent too far.
How, though, do you explain these thorns? They must mean something. No one tears apart their own chest without a purpose. Or do they? I don’t know how this works since I only discovered it today. Perhaps you can carve out a home there in the carnage and live in a shredded cavity like a cave.
A full sort of empty.
I’m guessing the big thing, the important thing, is really a different thing. An unknown face who pauses at smiles, under a shroud of words much like these. Who wouldn’t rather a house of worn phrases than a fort of tattered tendons? Shifting focus hasn’t shunted any blood yet though, and so I wait. At breakfast. In backflips. Each breath a hair’s breadth from another puncture.
They were always there, these thorns. My heart grew them wild for you and you let me stab anything they could reach.