lettersfromimogen

            thinks about now is her aversion to bare feet, loading the last remnants of her into a thin manila envelope. The letter enclosed had taken him hours to write, treating every word as if it were as fragile on the page as the ornate glass Christmas ornaments they’d collected on their last trip from London. When she’d come to collect him for good.  He hears them now. Crashing down. The words. The years. Shattering around his naked feet in shards. As if he’d run over the tree like their life with his car. He’d already thrown out her toothbrush and thought that by removing her hair from the comb they shared in the bathroom, he might exorcise her completely. But her smell remained, like the impression her body had made in the bed where he slept. He closed his eyes against the memories and resolved that loneliness and spite must taste exactly like envelope glue.

              for him to call. the waiting. sometimes. too long. holds her head in her hands. the heels providing a providence of pressure that she wishes might deliver her up into the indefatigable way the word sanctuary gets trapped at the back of her throat in those disconnected moments when she's trying to dial a phone number or she's forgotten the location of her house keys. sentences like serpents waiting to gash her skin. and she loathes the waiting. the way weeks work themselves into incomprehensible months and years and lifetimes she's already known that weren't living. she's already ripped them all down. the memories. the pictures posted with sticky tape on the wall. the scent of the word love and how it lives now just out of reach at the back of her refrigerator.

               weeks, madness. Of frequently locking himself in the bathroom to stand naked in front of the mirror. Proof that he is still alive. Sometimes, after a long hot shower, he thinks about scratching her name into the blurry screen.  Would he write it backwards or forwards?  The question, like trying to recall the way her tongue always felt sliding down the shadows of his spine—melting and sticky like the soft serve ice cream cones he’d seen himself eating in outdated home movie footage, feels too hard to bear. The towel clears the mirror.  He clears his throat.  Shuts his eyes tight.  The way he used to do when she’d call to him from this bathroom and he knew what it meant.  That she’d bought some new outfit as a treat for him.  The anticipation of placing his hands on her curves or her smell like warm vanilla and sugar became the thousands of swimming colors he’d see in that dark space of time.  Blues and reds.  Pinks and whites.  This time the sparks don’t bring her into focus.  He opens his eyes to the sugar coated mirror and the smell of the bathroom like a damp back porch.  Like wet newspaper.  Heavy and cold like the aftermath of bad news.

                             opens pop cans. the dumb clicking sound the tongue makes when the tab presses itself against itself reminds her of what life must be. but she always pours that contents out. can't stomach the high sugar and carbonation. she wants life to be what it was when she was small and before the rotation of the world leaned itself so indelibly on her image. she wants to go back and edit out all of the glitches in the film. roll the reel back and let the loose end tick and tick itself until she finally figures out. how to sleep through the night.

I've been writing you a letter. About skin and bones. The Ethernet. Sometimes it begins I've been to London three times since you held my hand--buried your face in my hair--and said you loved me in line before the international terminal . Sometimes it doesn't. Usually, probably, I'm writing to the wrong person. The sky is waiting storms. I breathe it in. Full of August flowers and destruction. The monochrome of the day makes life seem more navigable. It's been ages since I've fallen in the shower. And I no longer require you for picking up my pieces. Sometimes I wonder if all my transgressions have coalesced. Crawled into my left ear and taken residence. This dull residual ache. Like the slow crushing sound of my bed frame under the weight and pressure of bodies. Moving.

       stands in the shower, lately. Thinks too hard about those times in the rain smoking spotted cigarettes in the late cold grey afternoons with him. Talking against the air like the overflowing ashtray of a used car. She misses the way his right eye used to close involuntarily when the sun sparked them both through the clouds. The secret ways we move impressions on one another without words. Her nose drips red against the tub floor. Slides away in splatters. The regret for leaving an impersonal note as a gesture of goodbye feels like that childhood mistake of discovering the secret of all her Christmas presents long before the morning. She presses her forehead into the cold wall. The back of her hand like a bandage against the openings of the nose and mouth. Wonders if memories stop like blood. The shower is the only safe place to stand. These blood years. The water doesn’t wash away the day she never saw him again. And how the weight of his love felt, when he waved from across the street, slick and suffocating like a rock on the tongue.