I don’t remember much about that particular
relationship… glimpses and flashes in a phantasmagoria. The big black roofless
jeep. You at the doorstep with coffees and in half a suit, after going home, 3
blocks down the road, at 6am to change. The road trips, the beats of the
Beautiful Girls, you holding my hand when we visited your beautiful
mum & dad on Wednesday nights, the smell of salt and sunscreen in your
skin, the way your Yankees cap kept the sun off my face, the way you wrote just
like you spoke and used words like “spewin’”… the way your little nose looked
on the pillow in the middle of the night, street light dancing through the
window, your eyes alive.
At the end I remember even less. All I could do
was f*ck. I remember your hands in my hair, your shoulders, arms, mouth. I was
trying to scratch some itch which would never be extinguished as long as I was
sick, I was in a place of automatism 24 hours a day, I made no choices, was
just a body, lost in an embrace and an orgasm, chasing the next escape. They were my darkest days until you left me, and
I saw a whole new patina of darkness in my state of awake nightmare, sleepless dream.
You were a scientist and a pragmatist. You saw an unhappy future with me. The final
straw was when I skulled a bottle of rose before taking you to hospital at 7am
that morning for shoulder surgery. 'I don't want someone like that to be the mother of my children." I nodded sadly and looked down as the sun set and you walked home. Your shoulder got better and so did I,
eventually.
You did the right thing. It has not been easier
for my Angel. But he has more faith. You were a scientist. Pragmatic, cold.
