I remember the first time K told me you cut your hair, I was dogwalking, the rhythm of my feet refined to the most unmelodic and repetitive repeating of foot after foot. I told her “I’m not listening, look at how much Oliver has grown in the past 2 months” while I listened explicitly to every word to fall from her mouth, the monosyllabic slurring watercolour of bittersweet orchestral sentences as she described the very epitome of you. Your hair, the sweeping and the buttery blonde sugar softness of it dancing so delicately in a halo around your crown.

In retrospect, she’s a fake bitch. I remember she wanted to know which dress to wear that would make her look the slimmest and which one would make you ask her to twirl around like a ballerina so you could stare at her in her dress a little longer; i remember choosing my dresses based on which ones I’d know you’d want to undress me from the quickest.

In some ways she was your sweet tooth and you were her insatiable, gigantuous, crazy crazed and continuous craving for the finest cotton candy so thin it tickles your chin like a beard, caresses your taste buds like sweet saliva with the juxtaposition of a harmonious melody, ebbing and flowing from the crevice of your upper right cheek to the hollow of your lips and gums. She craves you on Saturday night but I need you like water on a hungover Sunday morning, you’re my unquenchable thirst for the fine sugar that grabs onto your lips like teeth and toffee like teeth that pulls unapologetically and unpolitically as far as your auntie would say quite impolitely. The sugar that wreaks havoc on my stomach and dries my mouth of moisture.

Apparently at the club where you went on Sunday you asked her to dance. I don’t know if it’s worth it to say she was ecstatic to tell me, as I simply have an unappeasable need for the waltz between our tongues, and no not Mother Tongues but that of the physical; the harshity of your accent is tossed to the side for the time being. Apparently your exchange went something like: hi, hi, can i buy you a drink etc... may i have this dance or some transcendental and traditional and chauvinistic bullshit. To me you used to command “dance with me” with your eyes, right foot forwards with the gripping of your hands, and spin me roundandroundandround like a top with the intermingling of our acquaintance tongues, long before the innocence of our past transcended into the deprivation of our future.

I can still remember lying in the canopy of pillows and sheets... image: you the incorrigible flirt, me, après popcorn fingers, tracing shapes with our thumbs on each other’s being. The naivité of those juvenile moments when all could be made better with an I love you and sex. How empty and old that got so fast, when the tender pear shaped marks on my neck turned into a nuisance to cover up and your allergy to apples became an annoyance from enjoying the fruit of Earth’s labour.

K tells me about your kisses every Friday that we see each other. Apparently you’re “so good with your words,” and “always tells me I look skinny.” Funny cause, I also remember you being good with your words to other girls, sliding your palms down their backs and up their dresses because my larger figure is so perfect it “can only be seen in the bedroom.” Misogynistic asshole.

Mostly I want to know where you are; I want to forget you. I know you’re in her room, shaking everything - your fists, the walls, the bed with so much gusto. I want to forget you for the same reasons.

I would tear my heart into a trillion pieces if only to light your way home to me through a billion constellations of sizzling, sophisticated Socracity. At the same time I hope that you might become lost and happen to find yourself wandering eastward through park city in Utah, the plains of abraham, rice fields. That you will become distracted by the world’s natural beckonings and become infatuated with the simplicity of subverting your inherent values as you have such done before time and time again. over and over and over.

Last year you almost left me and never came back and I was so hurt and mad that I read your letter out of spite but it left me screaming for oxygen, a pool of heated waterfalls tumbling down my face. I sat in the Target bathroom, ass on linoleum, face hot from accepting the blame lain on me. I never felt more empty and alone and weak and powerless than in that moment—health is the precursor to all fortune and when you don’t have that, God only knows what’s left for you.

But yet I can’t seem to tear myself for you for we go together better than any pairing of delicacy: foie gras and pate, oils and vinegars, smoke and salmon. I want you to be mine but I don’t think you could ever be anyone’s—your soul screams freedom so loud I can taste the sweetness on my tongue and swallow it only to feel its remains for the rest of eternity. My craving for you is birthed from the nostalgia for our companionship that I feel before anything has come to an end. What to do but savour the remnants of every single brush, touch and glance and their antithesis’ of anger stubbornness and immaturity...