of wires and birds

everything has been organised into the memories.
'we who have been saved' (the title has nothing to do with it, really. It just helps to have a file name that isn't doc1.doc) will be put there too as it progresses.

“Ghosts love like this,” I say, smothering the soft words against the warmth of his neck.

“Ghosts are quiet,” he tells the top of my head, before turning away and reaching for the alarm clock. It’s time to go, but I don’t want him to tell me.

“It’s time to go,” he says, with an absence of regret that sits against my chest like a promise. He stretches, untangling us from each other, from this bed, from this slow love. The sheets are cold already, as though he takes the heat with him when he leaves, carries it in his pockets and under his shirt collar. I can not stand; can not unlock myself from this thing that I know is already ebbing away from me. Even now I smell the waters receding. The air is not as crisp as it was, and the salt in my lungs and on the ends of my eyelashes is starting to dissolve in the rain-heavy air.

And here we are, not rushing exactly, or hovering at some slow speed, but moving. Always moving our backs in agreement with the wall: away or along or against. I have never been more silent than inside just the thought of you, never more still, more aware of sand as glass and heat and a controllable urge. But outside of ideas you don’t hold much attraction.

"There is just one life for each of us: our own."

- - Euripides
The needle that skips, making a mistake out of the song your body knows in all its movements. The hand that stops before reaching, resting on a familiar knee instead of stretching fingertips across the absence of self. We are carved from stronger stuff, with our lips primed for vocal wars, the scrapes and salvos of the kind of abuse we have come to crave. I line my pockets with the distances between planets, the science of space and the lack of it.

We are the history makers, but hand to mouth is no way to be remembered. We mark our wonder with the fingers we press to wrists, with our bones broken and healed, with our gentle everyday miracles, with overcoming and undoing and walking to forever. It is a long walk, but oh, the road is beautiful.

I promise that I will always remember you this way: outlined a brilliant yellow by the light of the bedroom behind you, standing in the doorway, hand to hip and feet in the delicate shape little dancers learn. I promise that your hair (and the way it rested on your shoulders and coloured the left side of your face) will be the thing to wake me up in the middle of the night, and that the curve of your waist will be the thing to lull me back to bed. I will write symphonies from the sigh you gave, will lace them with the sounds of your feet crossing the floor to the frustrated mass of me against the window. When I am old and my sight fails I will press my fingers against my eyelids until I can see the colours of the skin on your reaching arm, your hand around the pen as though it were a part of you. I will know the slow way you slipped out of your dress like the lines on my palms. Instead of the rush of waves, the waves of voices, I will hear only you, whispering against the dark outside and the dark in my head, "if the words seem far away, love, write them over me."

I left you in that room, that bed, for a reason. I left you with those hot sheets and the cold side of the pillow and knew (like the way a hand knows its partner, like a wall knows the car that collides with it) that it would be my final exit. I suffered you through curtain calls and ragged standing ovations, but I was already half-gone when the lights came up for intermission and when the bell sounded to drag happy drinkers back to their seats I was out of costume and in the rain (perfect movie ending for our made-for-television film).

I have spelled my name in the morning coffee I refused to make you and written revised lines in the rings that stained the table. I pull you out for command performances when we need to relieve our tragic tendencies, when we have had our fill of romances, when we want a scene we know by something other than heart. Consider it dramatic irony, darling, that I never even let you into my bedroom. Always some other place, like a cold bench with your arms around me, hand on me and hot air on my neck. The audience (a pale collection of my doubts surrounding this whole business) knew it was doomed, so why didn’t you see? My need to be wanted upstaged my need to rid myself of you, and I’m working this metaphor to death in the hopes that you’ll realise that you were nothing but a dress-rehearsal of amateur theatre for me.

The Critics will have a field day.

this is an act of faith. My constant movement is pious now, not grave. This is the only way to worship – without altars or idols or mournful processions, awake in the moment between moments, touching palm to hip and whispering into sternums instead of bowed, clasped fingers.

I wash my hair in holy water. These simple admissions make my mother blush, latent religious guilt inside her mid-Atlantic scolding. I don't talk to god, I tell her, I scream broken poetry. I laugh and wring my hands. "My witness is the empty sky" and my feet know the ground almost as well as my knees, better even when I refuse the offer of a shuffling future.

'I have accepted Jesus as my Lord and Saviour' printed, like a newsflash lie, on my skin. I accepted Him before I knew, when magic and statues were enough, but now I accept that I do not need to be saved. Only one pair of footprints but the pattern in the sand shows me dancing into something that tastes like redemption.


Forever and as long as I want.

Ah, men.

more than 100 mph from the centre out, slower on the coming home. That was the year we gave up on calling it returning, because every backwards journey has to begin with leaving somewhere. Every movement is an act of departing; every welcome a separation from something or someone else.

I found a home in the pressure of your hand in the small of my back, but only fell for the force of it. I learned to disconnect your body parts, giving new names to old aches. I pulled the emptiness around me and found my comfort in pretending you weren't you. In the back seat, with my knees against the vacant passengers' chair, I practiced rolling the perfect cigarette and holding my breath, studied lying with an open face and opening bottles with my teeth.

I cut my hair because I thought I should and left it in the sink for you to find, a love letter spelling out "I left you before you came - - I'll keep you in my bones because you were never flesh for me." Nose bloodied and hands firm, I left.

I made up my mind to always leave that way, to taste the alcohol and the sugar and the bitterness of me on the tip of my tongue.

Time and again they wring their voices out over me - "Show, Rachael, don't tell" - but I don't think enough credit is given to statements and minutiae. I demonstrate with breaking glass and eyes like oceans, just how big a heart can beat.