I used to think it was magic the way you would find a way in. The way you could set water into flames. Now dust collects inside my crystal-cut drinking glass, water and solitude and lemon. Writers are strange in the way we produce wilderness all by ourselves, standing still beneath our own heavy thunder clouds, our rose petal skin is the skin of a difficult moon, full of craters, mountains, tri-fold papers.
But I don’t want to write this anymore to make it true. I want it to be true all on its own without words to have to hold it up. I am weightless and yet I can feel the freight train running over the tracks in my chest as you are quietly staring at me, turning your face into the breast of the fog, turning away from the life we made. And you are still here, your hands cold in my hands, waving, repeating themselves against shapes on the walls in the dark.
These are the signs we missed.
These are the bodies we surrendered and caved in on in the night just before the fingering dawn. Coffee and cigarettes and pale gray light peering through the blinds, shedding realization across my aging face. This is the morning I have been dreading my whole life.
This is the mourning the doves on my bare shoulders cry for, and all I ever wanted was to stroke their sorrow laden wings. Fix things, fix these
things.
I peel the sheets down off my feet. They have told me you are gone.
Why is it in the slightest breeze I still hear you breathe.
I wonder if forever, you will find a way in.
I wonder why we care at all for magic.
.
.
Allison Marie Conway 