What I Wasn't Told

I never watched it fall. I only ever saw the cloud you built afterward, and guessed at the shape of the storm⌥. I saw the moonlit glinting of walls you stacked around yourself. You told me they were just for decoration, a new style you'd seen in a magazine and settled on, nothing much. You told me it only made sense, with the climate changing the way it did. You told me a lot of things.

What I told myself was: that girl is a castle.

What can we do. You can't halt the wind when it blows. You can't demand it bat an eye when it is ready to hit you, square on. You can't spare yourself the burn marks, the sand in your eyes, the ash in your mouth, the scrape. You can't pretend the blow you took at someone else's hands wasn't yours to take, or tarnish it later with invented good intentions. You can't soften a hand hardening its fist. What can we do. Hand over fist, trust over fist, kiss over fist. Again, what can we do.

Anyway, I am not angry.

The taste of your mouth was always good at not letting me despair over it.

All these moons you spent building me into something that would hurt you back were days I spent walking circles around what was actually hurting me. All that time you spent finding ways to prove I was always leaving were days I spent finding ways to stay. All that time I spent proving it was never enough was time you spent proving it was never enough. There's no mystery here, no Rorschach test, no answer you don't already have at least one corner of.

Some things split clean. A hand opens, a fist unclenches, flight wakes up and forgets the clutch of claws. Other things splinter. You can't shave parts off without losing the shape that makes it easy to name.

One night I drifted into sleep with the faint certainty of your hands on my hips; I woke up sometime later to a storm of ceiling and no bed beneath me. All limbs and panic and instinct, scrambling for shelter. All breathless and bent-double and bruised.

What I'm saying is: sometimes we survive without meaning to. Sometimes we survive without knowing we've survived. Sometimes we survive with only bruises to show for it.

Sometimes we survive with fifty ways of admitting it softly, kindly across the miles between us, and none of them will undo what we survived.

What can we do. What can we do except survive until we can't anymore?

Anyway, I am not angry.

But I will not answer when you call.