I think I’ll cry on the way out.
Today the heat is electric, an acid on the bones as the
hours climb higher into the sky. The blue is hot against the back of my eyes,
no breeze as I lay myself down into the grass, green enough after the rain as
if it could swallow me whole.
I am hoping it will before the end of my time here.
I am watching everything, as if by doing so I can imprint
the curve of the road into me, the lines of the sidewalk, the brick of the
buildings along my route home as I bike the hills, breath panting, skin
boiling, heart beating along the edge of my mouth while I try to breathe. I am
trying to breathe.
As if I can cage it all into my body, smear this feeling
across my face, down my neck until the blood of it all reaches my heart. For
there are only so many moments left, the beat of this pulse against me,
counting down each second until I am gone.
I am finally leaving.
But this was a long time coming.
And I do not know how to express it anymore, as if I could
have tried, written the cracks of my history out across my body, stretching the
blades of my shoulders down into the page beneath the burn of the sun as I
light my pale skin on fire. This is everything in these moments, the flight
down the hills, the turn in the roads, the pale lights of the streets in the
warm silence of the evening.
I have existed here. Broken my heart against a boy who did
not know, shredded my mind to academics, pitched my body forward against the
asphalt, cut the lines of language and isolation along my skin, fallen in love with her as we
laughed our way past midnight. I am familiar with the taste of the air, the
feeling of desperation in the night as the semis roam the highway, the isolation a
fever across my skin even as I stretch out my arms and encompass the whole of
this town.
But in the end there is no choice but to go. For everything is now
ending.
