Hiraeth

It was when my father was a Hero and not a Human.

It is winter, and something bad has happened. You're sitting on the front steps trying not to cry. The street is quiet, and when it starts to snow, the world is still beautiful.

I think: How could this happen Peter?

I think: the world has stopped watching us Peter. They stand, stand cowardly, stand like they're never meant to sit, wearing their 1920's leather Dongola Oxford loafers and pressed suits to be gunned down in tulip fields.

They say: you're the one holding the gun.

I can't help but think I'm swallowing the bullets. I feel them squirming in the pits of my stomach like a tease, a goddamn tease, Peter. A reminder of how I'm doing every-fucking-thing wrong. Eventually, a sinful slow of time, they ruined me. Holes as big as craters were in the wake of flesh, and I was bleeding out on the satin bedsheets from the hotel 2 blocks of our red-bricked, old-fashioned, decaying apartment complex. And I wondered what it would feel like to just die, because surely, surely, it can't be any fucking worse than this.

I remember thinking stupid thoughts; as I'm dying, I'm thinking of what life would feel like if you kissed me, lips on lips, fire on fire, burning, burning, burning, because I was already nothing but ash. A little bit more flame could not hurt. How your hands on my hips would feel, your fingers digging into the dips just below the bone, because you were starving, and sad, and so ostensibly lost. Your feet weren't your own, your hands weren't your own, and when they carded through my hair, I felt the world shift, and you went with it.

You were some crazy anomaly I sifted through every day and every night, and it drove me to damn near insanity. I couldn't have you. We couldn't be. Not because love lacked, but because there was so much of it. Overwhelming, and suddenly, every stolen kiss, every fleeting hug, became an all or nothing enigma. Every pull of your lips tugged something out of me; we're kissing now, now, because we may never kiss again.

I thought I found solace in knowing I could have all of you, while also having none of you, but I realized that peace was a delusion. One of us would always come back bloodier than we left, and it was so scary having to decide whether to let you go or not. Every time I tried, and I tried really fucking hard, you found me trying to forget you. And you made me remember. I hated you for a long while. Hated you for making me see; you wounded so bad my fingers twitched in question to bring you to the hospital, or when I could barely walk because so much blood had secreted I could see stars, and you were lingering over me like a nurse. A nurse in jeans and a goddamn navy Midtown sweater. God did I hate you.

But I loved you even more. God did I love you. It began to feel less like tranquility and more like suffocation, and I was fucking choking. After that, I thought a lot about what it meant to be intimate rather than to be lonely. What it meant to stay rather than run. I was good at running, but I was even better at staying (he was very persuasive).