shoegazers

set in a painting, swept in brilliance and ready to peel, they fade softly in a moonlit apartment. warm blankets of dust and light fall on his shoulders while he writes–finding his meaning under piles of the past, searching and scratching and scrubbing it down.

she watches, moved but not moving. she wonders what the next three months will mean, and who will occupy his table when they have turned to ghosts. she communicates with fingers and eyes that he doesn’t quite catch, even when he tries.

even when he cries, he loves her, wants to make it last in final days and across breakdowns and continents. he  eats his dinner on a couch they’ve shared before. a record spins familiar. it’s possible that he feels her uncertainty but some things, like heavy weights we can’t explain, go unmentioned on nights like these. with the songs of our youth and piles of the past to crawl through, with dinner to eat, with fingers to study.

there’s another one that’s wandering somehow in headphones and soft skin and the smell of new shampoo. she admires his taste but is weary of his self-awareness.

she’s weary of most things these nights, and thinks of europe and things more certain like the stories we wrote in our innocence. i try to remind her of the things we have gathered, i show her images of triumphs, and florida boys we’ve married in our minds, we talk of how we used to  talk and how unbreakable we were, right after we broke. but it’s not easy to rid our bones of it all. heroin heatwaves and hospital beds. of the pictures that have stained our skin as they melted away.

across city lines we hold onto each other as we shake it off. we teach ourselves back to life with songs that crash and boil in our blood, and we stitch one another back together in unheard laughter. there are new landscapes to hold us.

we can’t stop the ocean of sun that drains the colors from the living room, but maybe that preservation is not as important as we once believed. she holds him as she falls asleep aware of their slow disappearance. but she isn’t afraid of vacant walls; she looks for herself in empty spaces.