S O M A T I C R I T U A L

S o m a t i c R i t u a l

Wait until it is raining. By raining I mean pouring. I heard once, that a sign that your repentance has been accepted is rain. A gift. So go outside and let yourself be drenched in forgiveness. Wait until the mercy seeps into your bones and into your socks. Look up and inhale the possibility of the person you could become absolved of sin. Run your fingers through your hair and savour the knots, the barriers to perfection. Exhale your guilt and run away so you do not run the risk of inhaling it again. Keep running. Down the street. Down the path that takes you anywhere but here. Anywhere but where you started. Until your fingertips are numb and your chest is warm. Run your fingers over your lips and ache as your breath heats the cold of your palms. This is about contradiction. About oxymorons. About how opposition exists in your own body.

Look up at the grey of sky and ask it if mercy is a gift if you must beg for it, make sure there is no malice in your words if you want the clouds to listen. Think about why you are sorry and repeat the words to every puddle you pass until they mean nothing. They are just words. Excuses. Say them until your voice is hoarse and you are tiered. Do not come back until you are tiered. This is important. Trudge home in your wet clothes and soaked soul. Listen to nothing but your heartbeat. Listen to your heartbeat. Listen to your heartbeat. To nothing but your heartbeat. If someone stops you or looks at you oddly or asks you what you are doing or asks you if you are okay, remember their face. Remember their words and the way their life flickers in their irises. Remember them so you can include them in your poem so they can be forgiven too.

Wring out your sleeves and heartstring at the door. Politely decline the droplets offer of redemption. It's rude to decline a gift. But is mercy a gift if you must ask for it? And what does a sinner care about being polite. Go upstairs and crawl under your covers. It is okay if your bedsheets become damp. Take this as a practice in being grateful. You can apologize to your blankets later. Thank them for their sacrifice. Take a nap and dream of your sins. And when you wake write about the promises you have broken and the mistakes you have made and all the terrible things you have ever done. On the other side of the paper, write a letter to yourself about being deserving of second chances. Change your bedsheets and strip yourself of your guilty garments. Put them in the wash. Take a shower. Let the remnants of your hate and sorrow wash down the drain. You have paid for your sins, darling.

I think if I have to come undone for someone, I would rather it be you.

Which is to say, I would prefer it to be you. Which is to say, I would like to unravel, and I would like it to be at by your hand. Which is to say, I would like to earn the honour of being loved by you. That I would like to have the pleasure of loving you unconditionally.

Because I think that if I were to give you my heart, you would treat it kindly. That if I were to show you my scars, you would memorize their pattern. That if I were to bear my soul to you, you would bear yours to me. I would like to love you and be loved by you, if you think you wouldn’t mind it. 

Because I know you will always offer me the hot water for my shower first. And even if I never take you up on it, I know you will. I want that with you.

I would like cabinets over flowing with tupperware and glass jars and old ice cream containers in the fridge filled with your mint chutney. I want bookshelves crowded more with your hand bound make-shift notebooks than novels. I want to grumble about stolen covers as I wake chilled in the morning and laugh it off clinging to you for warmth instead.

I want sunlight filtering in through our curtains on Saturday morning to dust your lashes and cheeks and still being allowed to be the one to wake you. I want to watch you dance with a broom across the living room (as I wipe down the kitchen counters) singing to a song from a musical I haven’t listened to but have become familiar with through moments like these. I want you to try to teach me how to cook and not mind when I mess up the soup I attempt to make you when you fall sick. I want to be there when you are sick. 

I want to be allowed to care for you. I want to do so many loads of laundry together we forget who’s pjs belong to who. I want to stop caring about what belongs to who with you. I want to feel you slip into bed next to me at 3 am still scented with your favourite take out I left on the table for you because I knew you would be home late. I want that with you.

I want to memorize your favorite take out order and how you like your tea. I want to memorize at least 75% of your playlist. I want to be allowed to hold you when no one else is. I dont care if I’m always your plus one but I want to be the first person you call when the night is over. Your tipsy phone call filled with soft smiles and hiccups. I want to be the person you come home to. I want you to be the person I come home to.

I want to let you convince me that we should get a cat. Even though I have never owned a pet in my life. I want to realize it has grown on me as we both hold fast to your pillow in bed while you are away because it smells like you. 

I would like to be allowed to miss you, in a gentle aching kind of way. The kind tinged with the reassurance that you will be coming home to me, eventually. 

I don’t care what the books say. I want to hold your hand until the butterflies migrate out of us and we watch them flutter along the ceiling dancing with ribbons of sunlight. I want to know you until your presence evokes nothing but peace. I want to find peace with you. Which is to say, I would like to, if it is all the same to you. 

Fridge light starlight. Coupled with moonshine beams sifted through apartment blinds. Bare feet, barer legs, band t-shirt ball gowns. Cool hard wood floor only staining the tips of our toes because we are mostly floating. Teetering on the cusp of forever. I promise i won't let you fall (unless you ask me to). Come a little closer, little miracle, and let me warm the tip of your nose with everything I cannot say. Butterfly kisses that leave nectar residue on your cheeks, the syrup gently trapping dreams drifting through the ether. Swaying to a melody you hum already half asleep on my shoulder. I hold a galaxy in my arms and feel both infinite and so so small.

Wishes made over milk and cookies, too many to count,  all of them tasting like childhood. Crumbs of innocence litter the tiles of the kitchen floor. Sticky fingers and bottomless appetites giving way to eternity. Giggled promises made under comforters muffled in pillowcases. They absorb our whispers into their threads, keep us warm long after the chill of silence settles us. We say little. Listen to our heartbeats. Melt into the darkness. Become constellations. Hold the universe between us in our cupped palms as we drift away. Wake to find we have suffocated it as we slept.

~There will always be more poems for you, my love ♡

The idea of you spending the rest of your life with me makes me sick.

Which is to say I do not think it would be fair of me to sentence you to the rest of your time with me. What a shame it would be for your years to be wasted on us .

What a tragedy for your infinite love to be reduced to soft smiles and to drip slowly through cupped palms. Reduced to weathering skin and decomposing dreams.

I do not think I could bare, chaining you to us. When I know there is so much out there calling to be known by you.

What a sin it would be, for your infinity to be stifled by my desire for a fleeting eternity with your unfathomability. Your soul a broken record of lost potential.

I do not think either of us would be happy, for long. The endless loop of what could have been, lulling us to sleep and waking us at dawn. The winding melody threading itself between us as we hold eachother in the dark.

Your unfuillment clouding the windows. My guilt cracking the floorboards. The rements of our love sitting in a shoe box at the top of the closet. A fond memory of our youth that evokes more slammed doors than it should when we dust it off over a glass of Nostalgia. We don't know why it makes us so angry. So sad. To recall that we have become nothing of what we thought we would.

I think fate would forever resent me. For stealing you away from her. Life plotting our drifting slowly. Poking holes in our roof, flooding the kitchen sink, fiddling with the thermostat so its never quite right.

Until we find the silence (a once soft blanket we giggled under in the pillow fort we made in the living room)-- thread bare. Itchy. Fraying. Slowly unraveling. Until we find ourselves sleeping back to back. Holding hands awkwardly for photographs. Not talking until noon after 3 cups of water downed coffee. Dinners eaten at different times and tight lipped smiles with sad sighing eyes as we cross unexpectedly in the one bathroom in our appartement.

All of the kisses I brush across your cheek tasting of apology. Both of us trying to hard to let it be enough. Life, a spited lover picking us apart slowly. It would never forgive me. I would never forgive me.

I do not want that with you. I want forever with you. And I think the only way, for us to have that, is for me to let you go.

But love,

Please

Come back

And visit

I will patiently await your breif moments of return. Savor the sticky honey footprints you trek into the house. Every step dripping in hope. You-- drenched in life.

Wring out your sun soaked skin over the bath tub while you tell me tales of the way the universe has made love to you an infinite number of intricate revaltions.

Your eyes sparkling with a garden of blooming constellations that would have long ago wilted if I asked you to stay. Let the glittering of the stars in your gaze tell me I made the right choice. That it would have been selfish to keep you,  in all your miracle, to myself.

The taming of your galaxy. Until it be consumed by its own blackhole in self preservation. Making itself small enough to plaster itself across my bedroom ceiling. Call it the sacrifices you made for love.

No. I would rather miss you recklessly gentle. My longing tinged with the knowledge that you will return, to assure me that that love I refused to take from you is being spent well. That the time I refused to steal from you is being spent well.

My needing double dipped in the the belief

That

You

Will

Come

Back

To

Me

If only to rest your weary soul, a moment. My little shooting star. My little galaxy. And tell me tales of your travels, without me.

And I

Let the quiet of the night devour me

Let the darkness feast upon me

(As though they crave even the crumbs

Of what remains of my existence)

And I find myself laying awake,

(Patiently)

Waiting

For them to come for me

Because it is in these moments

That I feel most desired

And even if I dissipate this way,

(Slowly consumed night after night),

Atleast I will fade

Unafraid

And

Feeling

Wanted

Your wife changes her hair color every season and her personality adjusts slightly. You’re secretly only in love with Autumn wife. She just came home sporting her Winter color.