I am harboring pieces of him like fugitives, stuck here, a cluster of cells and soul, and this ghost does not want to go. Inside my body it is a collection of memories, too. We made this in the dark or in the morning, he and I, each time with our hands in each other’s hair, each time with poems and confessions and exclamations of love. This ghost is here because once, somebody loved me. I place my hands over my abdomen, I press down, I say, Did you just come here to die?
Did you, darling disaster, you simple, barbaric accident, did you just come here so that you could give me no choices, so that I could wonder if I might have wanted you, did you come here so that I could lay on the shower floor wiping blood off my thighs, alone, so that I could wonder if maybe the blood would not stop and I could die with you? Did you come here for this? Just this? Did you decide you would build a home, uninvited, to remind my body that it can be broken? I didn’t ask you to come here. Why did you come here?
What if I had wanted you? What then? What would you have named yourself? Would you have grown green eyes or brown? Who would you have been? No one. You would have had no eyes, you would have been no one. Because you made your bed in the wrong part of my body.
Did you just come here to die?
Now it is just me and this body, waiting for you to leave. You and all the parts of him still here. There is his shirt on the floor. The flower he wore in his hair. A book I asked to borrow. And the bits of his body that never left my body, that began to build their own body, which is now just an accumulation of blood on towels and a dangerous ball of cells and unreturned texts, and he is gone because I sent him away. He is gone because when, a week later, I asked for him, it was too late. He had left forever and now he is nowhere and I want to be nowhere too. A different nowhere. An other nowhere. There must be infinite nowheres.
Now, we are all that is left, you and me wearing the remains of his wet, collapsing, origami love, and you are dead, lodged in my body, and you have the last laugh; you do not have to survive this and I am supposed to. He is gone, and I cannot make you leave before you are ready. My body does not want to survive you. My body wants to leave with you, wherever it is you are going. You and me, and the water from the shower beating down on us, what can be lonelier than you now? You and me and how desperate my body is to be empty, it will not even hold food. When you have left, I will be empty. Emptier than I have ever been. And what will you be? A trail of tissue and heartbreak sent into the sewers, to dilute and disintegrate until there is no evidence of you ever having been here, of him ever having been here, of him smoking cigarettes by my bedroom window with his limbs entangled in mine, of any words he ever spoke to me here. You and him and how you are part of each other, how I cannot separate you. You, just blood and tissue, slowly crawling down my thighs to the shower drain, to where there are gods and ghosts and nowheres. I want to go with you.
I want to go with you.