september twilight

a glimpse into the summer of fear

with a september twilight draped around me, a buzz settles beneath my bones. a hum in the back of my head that never quiets down reminds me of what hasn’t happened yet. how long have your days been spent grieving what still allows oxygen into the lungs? if you come back, come back, come back… then maybe we can reopen these wounds; they shine a light so i won’t have to search long to find you.

taking a blade to my thigh, i let the blood travel down and guide me to the woods. i haven’t been here since the incident, but i want you to know that a voice still wails in the wilderness. (this time it isn’t me, but it’s not her either.) do you even remember the incident? the summer where the heat nearly melted flesh off the bone. the summer that transitioned into the winter of broken bones, black eyes, and bloody noses; the last few weeks of the year where we kept collecting injuries in hopes that we’d find the god of our childhoods. we didn’t though, instead we inherited a sickness.

aches in my stomach and bruises on my forearms accompany the buzz under my bones, something is telling me that you’ll be dead when you return. it’s not surprising, nearly everything on this earth begins and ends with dead best friends. in spite of the morbidity, i pray i’m the one to find the body before all the others; (a part of my brain holds itself hostage with the mission of finding you, but i’ve always hated the seek and loved the chase). even in death, we’ve never been the types to hide away from one another and throw away the keys. we sleep with them under our pillows, dreams of unlocked doors and guns unloading haunt us nightly. when this story comes to a close, retell it from the end; grant us all the pleasure of morphing from feral and vile into images of cookie-cutter purity.

when we all reunite, we’ll stumble upon a clearing in the woods with shovels in our hands. we’ll be on the search for a thing that struggled, a thing that limped towards death (which is braver than what any of us should’ve done)… when we bring it back up for air, we won’t understand the feeling immediately; soon enough, we’ll know why the uneasiness was more prominent than the rage. at least that’s what the voices have been whispering in my ears, the ones in the attic of the old home that we explored months prior in a daze of recklessness.

you will come back to us exhausted and covered in ruin. everyone’s love for you will shift and rot, except mine; i will always be the person who loves you at your best.

people will ask if we wished it could have ended differently, but they don’t understand that this was destined from the beginning. this was always where the knife was meant to strike; we were the ones fated to carry the wound. locking our doors from the inside and turning off our televisions would not have prevented anything; we all knew the rope would end at some point, that in the distance future we’d stop fighting back. (but i knew more than anyone, i knew which death would bring us closer and which would leave us stranded at sea.)

summer’s ending in death again, with sorrow gripping it in a lingering kiss. we all hold white flags in the face of winter, we’re pleading to be born again as nature decays. i’ll let you know how the coming months go; i can’t promise that we’ll survive, but at least you won’t be alone.