geography lesson

and here we are
                 again,
breathing in this ocean-sharp air, the taste of it rough against our throats. we blame it for the sudden absence of words, as if sometime in the night when we were sleeping in separate rooms there was a thief, reaching his shadowed hand into our mouths and twisting the letters and sounds from our tongues, leaving us empty, and dry.

when you open your mouth, fishlike, you gape because you are lost in this desert of your own uncertainty, without water. you are


              _lost.


if you are a desert, harsh and vast, i am the sea, chaotic and just as vast. we will die on opposite ends of the world—you will shrivel quietly in the heat of the glass-bright sun and i will drown in dark water, softly.

i can imagine you splayed out on the sand, an ethereal spider of flesh and bone. i can see your body drying, water dripping out of you and seeping into the sand. there is an enormous wet ring around you, you are feeding the desert with yourself, and somehow it is beautiful even as the sand grows dark and your skin does too, shrinking in on itself.

and as your eyes close and your paper skin crinkles softly, there is a
rushing, like the breath of a massive beast, and as you smile for the last time
           (it should have belonged to me,
           this last broken beautiful smile)
i know it is the desert breathing.

i can feel you in the other room, on the couch because you do not sleep with me, i can hear you breathe. my fragile heart is trying to match its beat to the sound of
                      your lungs.

as you lie there, cold because i am not with you, do you think of me? i know how you will be sleeping, your blue eyes jumping in sleep, your sandstone hands under the pillow. your skin tight over your muscles and bones, your hair black to match the shadows in the folds of your clothes, your lips smiling at nothing.
           (i know this because i have memorized you.
           you are hard to
           remember, there is no pattern
           to you.
           there are no mnemonics for the way you move.)                                           

for now i will believe that you dream of me: that in the place under your dark hair and under your dark skin and under your smooth white bone, i am there. i would like to dance in that place, i would like to paint pictures on the inside of your skull so you will remember me.

when you begin to drift in this strange soft place called sleep, i hope you dream of oceans. i hope you dream of me, floating, a bright human speck in this expanse of cold water, and of the way my hair will look spread on the surface.

when i die i will die
           w i t h o u t  a i r .
my breath will be silver as the life escapes from me in tiny sharp bubbles.

and as the water closes over my head i will think of you, thinking of me, and the smile in my saltwater eyes will be for you. the water will be like ice, the taste of it mineral and too sharp, and the slick of it on my face and in my eyes will be rough and—and—there is a chinese word for this feeling of black seawater against your skin but i do not know it in english. you were always better with words.

i know what the water will feel like because it is the feeling of you looking at me and telling me you do not love me, even if i knew all along you were lying.

weren’t you?

it will not hurt to drown, not in the same way words hurt or fire hurts. it will be a silent sort of thing, calm (but cold). i will lay there on the surface, quietly, buoyed by the fathoms of salt, stretching under me away into the dark, and i will think of you and of sunsets.
            (i would like to die during a sunset, ears filled with water
            the better to see the colors.)
and when i swallow one too many gulps of water i will begin to sink, slowly as things go in the ocean. the sky will be dark by then, stars peering out curiously from their quilts to watch me, sinking. i will not struggle or fight, because it is impossible to fight water—
                      i will let it take me, gently.

i will disappear under that smooth dark glass to become bones, polished by fish and currents, embedded in the sand. (my skull will make a parlor for a fish, my kneecaps playthings for sharks. i will feed a crab for weeks.) and before my head goes under and my eyes are made useless, before i go to that quiet cerulean place, i promise to take one last breath, a breath of remembrance and of forgiveness.

i promise to breathe it for you.