Roses
4-5-11
It’s a cliché- wine, candles, the red trail of flower petals. You’ve even got Sade crooning low from the speakers. I should snicker, kept safe in my cynicism, but instead, instead I break. I cry explosively, red-faced and leaking, pulling in great heaving gasps of breath to gibber unintelligibly at you. It hurts to be opened like this, cracked like an oyster by the simplest of tools. Your kindness hurts. You hold me and pretend I didn’t ruin the mood.
Distance does funny things. I save your letters, smudged cryptic by familiarity, tearing at the creases. I study them like some dusty codex. The phone is a magic portal from which your voice recites poetry in German, Portuguese, Czech, your native Spanish. Nights it chants, weaves a spell and I see you slick in your wetsuit, black hair thick with sand and salt, or maybe in your UCSD hoodie, or that poncho you got in Tijuana the weekend we met. Days, I imagine you in your lecture halls, or making tamales with your mother and numberless sisters. Your life is a foreign land, with its promise and richness. I dream it into being.
Leapfrog the states, the space between us. I may fly coach, but it feels vaguely European, my big love story. This flight I’ve something special for you: a cross for my Catholic, white gold. Diamonds. I can’t keep from opening the box, tossing little lights across the lap of the anxious woman next to me. Put away, then out again it struts- turning round and round, a good luck charm, a fetish. I rub my fingers raw with its magic.
Slow-motion reunion on the tarmac, lifted up and spun around, my feet landing for the last time. I hand you the velvet box and you hand me more of these damned red blooms. Wings gone now, I see it coming, see it gone hissing with the sun into the Western sea. This is the moment I will look back on as the turning point. Not months later when you ask to renegotiate the terms of us. Not after your awkward confessional phone calls, begging forgiveness: I am already stone. It is ego before it turns to truth, this assessment of Cain’s offering.
I love you more than you love me.
