—LOUDER, FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK

Scream

 

 I cling to the last strands of summer like they’re a life line, the sky full of foment, my organs unpredictable jelly. Even the sundeck we’re sitting on feels rickety.

 

 Your eyes are wide but hollow. You’re not looking at anything. Nothing’s changed while everything has.

 

 A car is on its way for you even as the distant fires send their ash and dirty linen to me. The smoke in the trees feels appropriate, like a long gray slur, or shadows on the lam.

 

  I could tell you any number of things, but there’s a health scare caught in my throat, wasps coiling inside my lungs.

 

 Across the lake, flags sashay in the vulgar breeze. They remind me of our youth, skinny dipping while the neighbors watched with their telescopes. Oh, to be that young and never care what others think or do. Oh, to have you yearn for a patch of my skin again. Oh, to oh.

 

 It’s trite but true--when Sam leapt, he took us with him. But you’re not the only one who hears the crack of body against water. The hornets scurrying in my head knit that scene for me every night, and most days I feel my bones break like Sam’s did.

 

 Sure, there’s much we should have noticed and registered, but the future seemed slick, easy and inevitable then. It’s a harsh lesson learning life can also be fickle, two-faced, and untrustworthy.

 

 So, we’ve landed here, two stooges, two new strangers, one of us still desperate for the other, despite the chasm. I’ve never seen the years weighing on your face more than right now, yet neither have I ever seen you more beautiful than in this moment.

 

 You haven’t said where you’re flying, and maybe I don’t want to know. Those bags are over-sized and heavy, which is telling as well.

 

 If I said, I love you, It was my fault, I’m sorry, nothing would change, but I need to one more time nonetheless. So, I hand you the note and walk down the lawn to the shore where the lake is rippled like a sweat-stained bed sheet.

 

 I don’t bother disrobing because there’s no need to anymore, there’s nothing anymore. 

 

 I dive in and stroke stroke stroke down through the deep green-gray. I stay under for hours and days and years, waiting for the water to scream back at me, which it never does.