lovelorn

The heat always stays its own story, the sheen of salt and sweat, the weary and the wear of it. It clings skintight to clothes and stories, seeping through every telling, making itself known. It whispers to you oh so it’s the summer, or oh, they’re in the south of France. It adds that inferential portent, the dripping before all the squeeze and slide shows up. All the air around it given greater weight as it permeates even the abstractions of flesh. Only the heart has more authority on the edit and the drift. The heart keeps talking whether you’ve already heard them all. The heat keeps at it, but the heart just goes.

Old letters in dusty boxes. The delicacies of ardent love gone to artifact and silverfish, one thing always turning into another if you give it a while. All the aches that remain of acquisition, the wounds that you age into, once the perspective sets in. This chasm of want and wonder, this empty left of you. The thought caught on some misunderstood moment or compelling retelling, the story you talk yourself into. Lovelorn for some scattered beads. Lovelorn for the way her shape stuck in her empty jacket. Something gone, something forgotten, something made up on the fly. Some brief context, some withheld evidence. Someone ever there at all, and not some imagined intersection.

There’s always room in the margins. There’s always somewhere to scribble something down. Maybe a different set of endearments, maybe a better hand. Learn where to aim the engine, stare at the right shape on the wall. Leave something besides these awful fits of focus. Write something besides the wrong thing down. Instead of this knowing while you watch, this hitting hard long after. The letters, the litany, the leaving light. Heart enough left to hurt.