If I leave - napowrimo #1.5

The lipstick stains on your light blue shirt will wash off with a little lemon and hot water - like I showed you. Will you do it well enough without me? (Don’t squeeze too much of the lemon, it’ll ruin the fabric) I know your hands might tremble when you see the deep red leaking into the basin - try not to think of it as the lifeblood of us. It’ll just be lipstick to you when I leave.
If I leave. 

Will you change the arrangement of your bookshelf? Will you take the pain of going through your gargantuan collection, and run the risk of finding two or three books that we bought together? What if you find an unruly note that I wrote to you? Will you return it to its rightful place, or will it make a home in the ashes of your hearth? I have a hunch that you will collect any paper, parchment, letter, ticket, recipe, bill, photo that bears my cross and store it in a box in the last shelf of your study table. Your hands will run to these bits and pieces of me against your will. Your wistfulness betrayed you when I first met you, and it will betray you when I leave. 

If I leave. 

I sense a pattern here - I’m worried about your hands the most. Will they go cold and numb when a new texture touches them, and it isn’t my hair? Will you see the ghosts of curls wrapped around your fingers when you go to sleep? I hope you don’t, I wish you a good night’s sleep every night, with or without my head on your chest. Will your fingers dance along the curves of a new smile and freeze? Will your palms cup the happiness and light of another world after me? I hope they don’t - that would be terribly unfair to both of you. I hope I don’t hold the generously loving parts of you hostage when I leave.

If I leave. 

Will your shoulders droop when you step out for a walk? I hope they don’t - you know I hate bad posture. Will your hands be anxious without the anchor of mine? Maybe they’ll settle down in your pockets like old pennies earned from the written sale of melancholy when I leave.

If I leave.

Letters to the long night - napowrimo #1

Time has had a strange way of unfurling in these last few weeks. It may be the un-making of days itself - the unpacking of every single digit on the face of a clock. Time has no qualms about wasting itself on you, no regrets.

Mornings sometimes fail to wake me up properly - I am half-asleep as I stumble into a routine of housework - of cleaning and dusting and mopping and hoping for no more bad news. There is no dust for me to clean today, there was no movement to unsettle and settle its particles yesterday. The morning will pass in breakfast table talk of rot and rage, and then aai will go to chop cucumbers for a fresh salad.

In the city, the lights aren’t asked to stay home. Instead, they spread their garish yellow-white wings and leap into rooms, uninvited. These wings pierce the drum of darkness that tried to drown out everything, even the silence. Gaping holes are left in the night. There is nothing else, no sounds to interrupt the strains of music that waft up from the houses around me. This stealthy arbitrariness has crept into my nights, where once the sun sets, it’s anybody’s guess.

I know I long for faces to touch, they are the surfaces of my real home. There are eyes waiting for me yet on the shores of the other ocean, shoulders waiting for my touch. I know I want to hide once again in the silence that is crafted by my favourite breaths - not this weird, misshapen, jagged silence that prowls the streets and throws glances at my dark window.