Riverbed Girl.

Disconnected and walking to a place I’ve been before I wonder if you’ve been here too I think you do know what I mean when I say it say it twice I’m sick of pretending it's alright when I can feel that tremor of something shaking and don’t brush it off again brushin your shoulders clean like flickin dandruff - there aren’t words enough to describe all the white lights bursting behind my eyes when I close them against the tide and the pressing up of my forehead on your shoulder isn’t warm enough to thaw out that frozen part of me that speaks in cryptic code like a child trying to hide a secret or a grown man trying to be discreet about it. Body like a cello with that spinal chord ringing loud and silent in that evening way, I saw that eye gaze to the floor when the water sprayed our hairlines cold and everything you thought you knew about the way my eyes can blink away the me and you was rewritten by the fingers on the triggers of all those little deaths and all those missing strings still make a sound to me. All those little secrets still bubble over like boiling oil in a pan too small to hold all the junk we tell each other under the pretence of bonding or communicating or simply tryna find a glimmer of truth within the space between our noses when we lie facing one another and yet we’re both any number of miles away, both simultaneously twigs pulling down the river and the current unearthing everything amongst it. The sun was an emaciated child wearing cream pleat socks and the sunshine skin was but a penny useless to me and full of unnecessary inevitability disguised as hope. He said he didn’t wear sunscreen. She said she didn’t trust the mobile phones. She said her doctors got it wrong and got it wrong again but I guess we all just have to pretend for a while and for the rest of our lives that these things all just turned out fine and put your faith in the man with the prescription pad and the glasses too bright to look at reflecting that hospital light like the shiny back of a cockroach. I never thought I’d be the one to really truly trust the way your hair behind your ear means something in my dreams but we’re all changing all the time after all, and I’m holding on to a dead butterfly found floorward and still coloured in the way life branded it. We’re not all the same. You’re the colour purple, tightly tucked into a playdoh bucket and smelling like the earth when it was new and yet to be trampled. I’m the clumps of sugar found at the bottom of the barrel and never removed because who has time to deal with shit like that. I smell like the ground when it’s been pissed on by dogs and drunks and men with an engrained sense of entitlement, given to them by their fathers and their father’s fathers and their father’s father’s fathers. There’s something to be said about that silence settling like a layer of dust, aren’t we all just forgotten ornaments in this old lady’s attic, important in that unimportant way, branded with an arbitrary meaning that only lives in her memory, too important-unimportant to throw away. Strip me of my varnish and lay me in the garbage bin, with the kind of care you’d dish out at the soup kitchen, ticking off the hours tryna be a better person. Isn’t everything we do in this world an attempt to be loved a little more.