Returning is a love language

An abstract, free-verse poem. Before reading this, I highly recommend reading this first -

FADE IN:

INT. BEDROOM - DUSK

My hands, warmed with memory again, begin my absence. I am taking the scenic route this time, a leisurely stroll down the mirrored avenue. Each reflection claims my body, shrieking in the darkness—this is you, and this too, all you—with a grand desperation of an exorcist.

I am returning to the start again with an audacious leap in time. You’ll have to grant me that. Grant me the sympathy for I am facing the misfortune inherent in returning. I have bled openly but by now you also know of the blood behind my own teeth.

Was it romance or just tragedy?

Am I here?

Are you?

BEGIN FEVER DREAM:

INT/EXT. LIMINAL SPACE - MEMORY

You are here, so listen, and by that I mean look

there, my absence, soon to be bright and sutured, like the sky violet with tenderness.

ME:

“Returning to the the start of our memory, it is drudgery I can’t be rid of”

YOU:

“Don't feel alone. Nature is an unhinged woman too, cursed to a lifetime of love for repetition. A painter confined to recreating her own masterpieces. Dawn, dusk, dawn and repeat.”

ME:

“Ever wonder if Ouroboros had a choice? Will the serpent get another chance or is it forever cursed to a life of symbolism, standing in for something other than the self?

YOU:

“I doubt it minds. Don’t we all want to wake up one day and find that life’s perpetuity suddenly has meaning? A sense of grandeur larger than this limited flesh? That this drudgery and disdain have been in service all along, to some quiet sanctity. That the morning light that pierces your windows is but a god playing catch with her sun?”

You ask me to consider repetition not a drudgery but refrain. Continuation is the very proof of something to continue for - a white sheet draped over a ghost. Ghost that calls itself hope and places itself just a block away into the next day.

Even the moon that night tells us to return is to be divine.

“All I ever wanted was to stand next to you at the ball, the windows flung open, people’s laughter, warm lights, to blunt the rough overeager edges of longing that has etched us here, against that wall, to look at you and to know, without words, that it was time to leave.”

You said you loved me and I knew I didn’t have to continue to be the sum of my misfortunes anymore.

END FEVER DREAM.

INT. BEDROOM - DAWN

Everyday, waking up on my bed, I emerge as fragments of myself - and I revel in this rediscovery. In repetition, I reclaim myself, make myself - mine again. So this stroll is the journey to refind my body. The body that is my last destination. The body that carries scars from untold stories, scars crooning my sole roadmap homeward, like cartographers of their own lands, suffused with magic.

The dawn - is it soliloquy, or just tragedy?

In a life so cataclysmically unending and deliciously brief, continuing becomes one’s singular duty.