Last year they made us all take a first aid course at work. I remember learning that, if you get stabbed, you should never draw the knife out of the wound. Still, here I am, on your living room couch and you are drawing breath from my open mouth. I’m gasping, as if in relief, but as everything inside me begins to spill out and seep into the cushions I wish you’d left it there to stem the flow. Everyone’s obsessed with poems about love and death. When I was 15, we studied Shakespeare and I was determined not to like it. I wouldn’t become a pretentious prick over a pair of suicidal teenagers who compared each other to the sun, and moon, and god, I said. But here you are, with one hand behind my head, resting on the arm of the couch. I ask you if my hands are cold, under your T-shirt they are, you say, but you don’t mind. I put my palm against your temple as if I’m taking your (celestial) body temperature and think about how this is all like some kind of poisonous eucharist. At least I’ll go to heaven when I die. So, I make some lame joke about you being hot—you laugh while you’re kissing me—and I wonder if Shakespeare had a point. Lust and pain are not so far apart, or at least that’s what they tell you. I think this is why people dress up as nuns on Halloween, even though they still have nightmares about Catholic school because you are allowed to long for a thing that hurts you if you can turn it into polyester and buy it in a cheap plastic bag from a costume shop, if you can squirt it with fake blood and dispose of it at the end of the night. Like a polystyrene moon, in a shoebox solar system. Like a science fair project on God. Love, and blood, and the moon, they’re all the same in poems. And I am walking home, slightly ashamed, the streetlights are beginning to turn on. I am trying to find my keys and all my things smell like you. In the windows, I see myself, standing there, a lupine figure on the porch, teeth illuminated by the light from my phone. My lip is bleeding, but I keep biting it. I’m trying to think of something funny to text you, something off-hand, and I try to think of ways to make this all your fault, even though it’s not. Standing here in the dark again. Like a werewolf, blaming the moon.
Featured photo by Martin Adams on Unsplash.
