Remember us on the water?
Skylar Tibbetts
The problem with romantics is:
We can never tell if we’re falling into love, or out of it.
We’re most likely doing both at once.
Here’s how:
Remember us on the water?
We’re on the water and simultaneously,
we grab the clock and hurl it into the gray.
There’s familiarity in this sadness,
sadness we want to dwell in.
And it’s self-sabotage, our diving fully in.
Our mutual melancholy always felt this way: a sort of wallowing solely to wallow.
A sick satisfaction in feeling this blue; a depth.
And we feel holy. We all do.
I run my tongue over my words twice to make sure they’re good enough for you.
I convince myself it’s better this way, that I’m better this way.
My tongue bleeds, and it tastes like late July: red, wrong, and wishful.
Hopelessness never felt so thin.
You’re rising in this water, and I am crawling deeper into this black city swimming pool.
At least it has a slide, we agree.
And the discussion is done.
There is a law somewhere:
It says that if words mean one thing to one person,
they inevitably mean something else to another.
This law is the villain behind everything broken.
And by everything, I mean us.
And by us I mean lying in
the sun-infused grass
because it was too hard
to walk and argue at the
same
time
Here, time is lunchtime, bedtime, sunshine, a continuous sort of pantomime where
we bend over backwards only to hold our hands over our ears and scream that our
back hurts, head hurts, love hurts, this hurts:
My nerves hurt, which means they're probably healing.
This hurts, which means we’re probably healing too.