Grief Unbuttons Her Blouse Still

If the saints knew the things I have dreamt of you, they would burn my name out of every book in existence. I would not be sorry -- I have tasted a holiness that no painted temple can seal, and I found it there, in that space in between your breath and mine. 

The moon may still remember you. She will rise slow and swollen, silver poured down the curves of her skin like the ghost of your skin under my hands. It is in those nights that sorrow comes to me, not that widow in black dress they blubber about in the sad poems, but you, just on the other side of a kiss. Her buttoned blouse hangs loose around her neck, and she undoes it with no hurry, no shame. I look at her fingers, those fingers I kissed one by one as they lounged on my chest, drift downward over each button, as if she were reciting the slowest prayer in the language of undressing.

Grief slowly unbuttons her blouse. Always slowly.

As if she understands, each undone clasp is another second I can never reclaim, another stride deeper into the delirious haze where memory and flesh become indistinguishable, I don’t watch her hands — I follow them, with my eyes, my breath, my desire. And in that slow descent, I am back with you. Back in that first hour when I placed my lips to the gap between your collarbones and silently, foolishly swore that I would never let that space go cold again.

She leans over me, and the scent that falls from her hair is yours — warm skin, late wine, and something so impossibly you, that my ribs constrict against it. The first contact of her chest against mine is intolerable, because it is exactly the weight you had when you lowered yourself onto me — slow enough to watch the fracture of my restraint, but sure enough to let me know that you would not stop.

I am not innocent, but you — you made me guilty where no pardon could ever lead. I remember when your blouse slipped from your shoulder, the unrepentant slope of skin to bone, my mouth closing onto it as not a kiss but an oath I meant to grow into an entire life. My palms spread reassuringly against your back, feeling your muscles lie silent but working under the silk, your breath when deeper. That beat still sleeps in my hands. I can even feel the shudder that gnawed into you when my lips found the small place just below your ear, and therein lies the cruelty. 

Do you know what I mean by cruelty?

Cruelty is the body remembering, remembering the temperature of a lover's breath more accurately than it remembers the sun of the very day. I remember you like this: the neckline giving, the hollow between your breasts slowly revealing itself, the faint tremor in your inhale when my mouth crept closer, closer — the heat of your skin rising into my lips like a confession.

Grief wears that heat now, though she is less warm than you ever were. She pushes her naked chest into mine like a tattoo, an imprint to graft the absence onto me, increase the stakes so I never forget whose body once taught me what it was to worship, and I am weak enough to let her. I lean my forehead against her collarbone, that same conditioned elegance where I once left crescent shapes, jewels unaccounted for. I smell her. And below her aroma, faint but alive, is yours: that unfathomable conglomeration of skin, breath, and I don't know how else to say it, something like the taste of a storm born one hour before it breaks. 

Your absence became the most intimate part of me. You are the ache under every rib, the phantom weight in my palm when I close my fingers at night. I do not merely remember touching you, and I do not only picture how holding you felt, but feel that I am still holding you; my thumb long-petting the arc of your waist to that place where your hips turned soft towards rebellion, my hand ran lower until even time ceased to exist. I still live there.

I have not touched another since you. It is not piety, nor is it grief -- it is simply that my hunger was meant for one mouth, one body, one manner of moving together through darkness. Anything else would be fraud. The hunger that I knew with you cannot be satiated by anything less than original sin.

Sometimes grief is kind and allows me to picture you as I last saw you - the blouse slipping off one shoulder, your hair cascading over it like the shadow of all the things I could not express, your eyes locked on me as if my ruin were the thing you had longed for your whole life. But sometimes she is cruel. She shows me you turning away, not leaving the room, but leaving me entirely. And in that picture, I reach for you, my fingers touching your back, as if that touch could change time. It never does.

You once said to me, “If I ever leave, I’ll leave you the map of my body,” and you did. Every place you allowed me to touch has become a mapped city now that I wander thoughtlessly at will. My tongue remembers your skin's language. My hands with their broken fingers remember every suggested boulevard. And when grief treasures herself before me, she is nothing of the sort - she is that map, and I am the dolt still thinking tracing it can find you. 

Sometimes-sometimes when I miss you, I think I would let you kill me for the right to die in your arms. Perhaps you always had that power, and perhaps you never felt the need. You unmade me more kindly than death, but more thoroughly than time. You left me in pieces, but somehow all of them still beat your name like a second heart.

So yes, grief is still unbuttoning her blouse. She cups my face in her hands, presses my mouth to her skin as if offering me from a chalice I once drank of, even knowing with my last drink I would no longer return to my life. I drink again, for the wine was lost some time ago, and only tastes of my ghosts in the cup. I kiss the hollow of her throat and imagine my lips sinking through flesh to reach the pulse that once raced for me.

And if there is a hell for this — for loving you beyond your existence, for making a lover of your absence — then, let hell come. I will embrace it. I would prefer this eternal fever to cooling my mouth in forgetfulness.

Come back in shadow, in blood, in fever — I do not care. 

Come back only long enough for me to take you one more time, for me to feel you beneath me, and for me to lose myself in that tender brutality we called love.

Come back to me in whatever form — a shadow in the doorway, a whisper in the leaves, the slow untying of a dress in a dream; I will meet you there. I will kneel. I will place my mouth where your heart used to quicken, and ask it to remember my heart.

Still yours,

Still yours,

Still kneeling in the dark,

Still dying for the taste of you,

The Man Who Will Not Stop Dying For You