When you came to me your eyes were bloodless fire. Something had caught you in its flames, was burning you electric as its teeth dug in it was changing you, and I could feel it in your mouth when I tugged at your lips with mine. Black licorice, warm whiskey. You were becoming something I could only recognize when you would speak, your silence was born of another species, something evolved, too evolved to be seen. Perhaps you were getting ready to go. Into the sun. That’s what you told me but you were already there. Even trembling in my hands you were wind rushing through the dry embers in my heart, everything I was made of was kindling.
When you came to me you had already been the ghosts flaring up in my veins. I see myself now: no words in my throat anymore, no words on my arms, no way back to whatever madness it was that held us just close enough together to watch us fall apart. How do I stop falling back into the familiar and burying my self there. How do I extract from myself what is safe and make love to the wrench in my chest. How do I crawl out of this skin and turn into something else, anything else. How can I grow beyond the walls you kept me in. I miss you but I don’t know how I can believe you are gone when I’m still not sure you were ever here. People are made of a certain collection of time, though we treat them cruelly, carelessly. We treat them like they are forever as they are vanishing right before our eyes.
Touch me from where you are and I promise I will not let go. Will never let go, will never let go. Not until the rivers have become the flames, not until the life of the last star is a kiss on the final breath of a vast and vacant universe. When you touch me I believe in the end. With a comfort and a grace and the sigh of knowing nothing ever had a name to begin with. In my dark garden you were light, and fire doesn’t need a name to burn.
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Allison Marie Conway 