quintessential transient

what we love, dooms us still.

that summer was hot, too hot, a cat-scratch fever season of late evenings and early, early mornings. and we were finally free, sun-bleached tassels dancing between the dashboard and rear-view to the voices of scandinavian black metal.

we kissed each other, deeply and fully, but only in the dark, only when everyone else had drifted into dreamland. i had never kissed someone so completely, with so much more than my lips, more than my body could represent. i pressed my soul against yours, collapsed my bones and sinew so i could lose myself within you, so that i could feel you in me.

i loved you with the heat of that summer, with the heat lightning that kept our nights alight.

it shouldn’t have surprised me when, at summer’s end, we forgot how to love each other. as the cold crept into the air, late that october, winter storms crept into us, icicles dripping from our lips and eyelashes. the heat of july made loving you easy, drove me to your arms and neck, but the first cold snap drove you somewhere else, into his lap, into his marriage. you were gone, so suddenly it seemed, and i was left with small snowy reminders of you all over my second-storey dorm room.

i felt your absence so fiercely.

you were on my skin, no matter who touched it after you. your lips had branded mine, so that everyone could feel you when they kissed me. you were in my blood, so i made me bleed, trying to rid myself of you. trying to rid myself of everything i’d come to learn that year — that a man who claimed to love me had broken me instead; that a woman i loved had traded me in for a man nearer by; that a friend would poison me to steal my skin. the world was too real without your hair to tangle myself in.

i was nearly gone, and the world was so, so cold, like i might never know heat again, and i thought, good. because no heat could match the fire you burned in me.