comatose-comet

we’ll always have #paris as will countless other couples who tag each other under the eiffel tower right where we stood together, beaming into the lens of a phone on self-timer extended out into the open spaces i longed to linger in. those selfies of us haunt my laptop screensaver, lie folded between profile pictures taken in vienna, strasbourg, budapest in the months after, my eyes never looking directly into the lens, frown-lines facetuned away, sleepless nights tucked under layers of photoshop and brushed aside by captions quoting drake lyrics. scroll down, my feed is littered with the likes of yours, sent before and after the break and the long process of archiving, blocking, removing. swipe right, my options are riddled with the likes of you, a thousand faces sharing variations of your twitter handle and hipster handlebar moustache. we will always have #paris and I can browse incognito mode the girl you’ve been tagging in Win a

it is Wednesday all day until it isn’t. never had much attachment to the days before now, saw them as the headings for collections of twenty-four novellas – who remembers days in memories? it is always the weather, the time, how your shoes pinched, how the birds sang, a memory is a picture of a thousand pieces kept in a box marked Friday. inconsequential until it isn’t anymore. the world ended in such a drawn-out way, you started counting down the days – not the hours and not the nights, weather and windfall, the absence of birds, the pinch of the solar system, all inconsequential. instead, those novellas penned in the last weeks of the world were just endless lists of Monday, Monday, Monday. Wednesday, Thursday, Sunday – unpicking forgotten gods from the roots, scalpel- wielding philologists finding poetry in phonemes and semantics. centuries of human evolution summarised in a chain of seven words: the order, the gods, the shared linguistic genes, the music,

she told me her favourite word one Tuesday when the sun fell sharp like lemon slices across wet tarmac and constellations of cigarette stubs, I drank it in – all these useless facts as if she would test me, hand me a paper with a series of questions: her favourite word, the song set as her alarm, whether she prefers seafoam or duck egg blue a perfectionist, I would get every answer right, be rewarded with those teeth clicking into a smile like champagne glasses shattering in an over-enthusiastic toast ask me whether she loved me and I would falter, but her favourite word was surreptitious and that’s exactly how I felt, holding my heart tucked in my sleeves and praying she would notice.

call my love tainted ground, would spit sacraments over it to have it blessed, pity she doesn’t know yet. writes my name in holy margins, hangs me on a cross-beam of discomfort and awe, strikes her as funny that I won’t kneel beside her, pity, pity. her folks always said widow's peak was haunted, best stay away since harlow came back bleeding dragging a blackthorn branch behind him, it’s no place for a priest’s daughter, pity, pity. she goes anyway, every Friday night in the witching hours when I can show her magic, haze, and hex, I let her stir the pot and make a god of her own hands, I wait - powerful spells need time to brew, pity, pity. brings me amulets for my troubles and ribbons for my hair, there was only white left, she lies, and I dye them black anyway. it’s a pity she doesn’t know yet, how doubts can fester like curses, how love can rot into malady – I’ve got a cure for the itch, pity she doesn’t know yet.