1
I love you:
Apple lips. The ultimate irony of your gothic pants, the way they reek of lilac fabric softener. You use words like doppelganger and fetch and double and changeling. I can make you laugh so hard you vomit chicken salad all over your father’s laptop.
You can’t play a single instrument, but you’re still the biggest rock star I’ve ever met.
2
You love me:
The way I eat entire melons, halved, with a spoon, or how I offer up different interpretations based on other ways of translating some our favorite Japanese songs.
We think of things the same way, and are always communicating as such, and are always so impressed with each other’s genius.
You call me lovely when I wear tight dresses and gold lipstick.
3
I love those days when we just go into my bedroom, smoke weed, and read Harry Potter or funny internet articles to each other.
4
Being around each other is just so easy.
5
You tell me that when you were a kid, you used to pick wild flowers and eat them.
6
You once said that God is everywhere so you felt no real need to be religious.
I said that God is Cognitive Dissonance and Confirmation Bias.
I didn’t say, Babylove, You’re the only miracle I ever believed in.
7
You wake me up at 3AM and we drive downtown, to the marina. You hand me a joint. We see a meteorite. We makes wishes. We kiss each other.
8
I will always wonder what you wished for. My wish: for your father’s company to call off the merger, so you don’t have to move. Maybe if you wished for the same thing, the universe will keep us together.
9
Today, you are talking about getting a tattoo. I don’t think much of it.
You keep talking about it for a long time.
10
You are googling how to give yourself a prison tat. I don’t know why two people as smart as us are surprised by the fact that it is as easy as snapping a pen in half and dipping a safety pin in ink.
11
Needle to skin.
12
Needle to skin.
13
Needle to skin.
14
Needle to skin.
15
Needle to skin.
16
Needle to skin..
17
Needle to skin..
18
Needle to skin!
19
Needle to skin!!!
20
“Fuck this, man, this shit is tedious. Like pointillism.”
“This was your idea, Baby love.”
21
You now have the image of a Torii Gate on your arm. You tell me they put Torii gates at the entrances of Japanese shrines. You tell me it represents the crossing over from the mundane into the divine.
22
We joke about tattooing the same thing right over my cunt.
23
We work on my tattoo, Jason in the room, all three of us watching Seinfeld.
24
The tattoo I decide on represents an inside joke—three black dots across the base of my spine. Jason gets the joke, but I don’t think you do. Its cause that shirt I wore all the time had three dots across the back of the neck.
25
My tattoo is smaller and less complex than yours. It shouldn’t take as long.
26
Still, my mind wanders as you work on me.
27
Your hands right there at my throat, face and breath so close to my ear…
28
Hot.
29
I like to draw pictures of you as a white-haired fairy king. I had a dream the other night where you were a fairy king, and I a brilliant poison purple flower. You plucked my petals and filled your mouth with my blossom.
30
Suddenly I’m thinking about everything we’ll miss out on when you’re gone. We never finished that comic we were working on. We could never get our conceptualizations onto paper. I saw your vision, you saw mine. Often, we could only explain what we really meant to one another.
31
Fuck, I want my three dots. Stick and poke takes forever.
32
Normally our projects don’t carry on this long, and your Torii Gate (the catalyst for this whole endeavor) is already finished.
33
This weekend is your last weekend in this state before you and your dad move across the country.
I am doing my best not to be devastated. I am not doing well.
34
The art we put, permanent, on each other’s bodies.
You kiss three points along my neck, but you only finish two of them.
35
I am Undone.
36
“Baby, this means you’re mine,” you smile.
God, your vampire smile.
37
Your closed eyelashes are a crow’s wing against your cheek.
38
It’s your last day here, so we ditch Jason and go to the park in between my house and your apartment where we first met.
39
Juxtaposition.
40
We lie underneath the largest rhododendron in the park. I pluck off large red blossoms, break them open, and suck from the
sticky sweet nectar.
41
You kiss me.
42
I put your hand up my skirt.
“You should use your mouth somewhere else.”
43
Sticky sweet nectar,
the smell of damp earth around us:
44
“Aaah!”
Oh my god baby why do you have to leave?
45
We talk about us. Well, we are always talking about us, but right now it is hollow and sad and unresolved and bittersweet.
“I’ll finish your tattoo next time I get to come home.”
46
I always pictured that if you were to break up, it would be as
Explosive
and passionate as the rest of our relationship.
47
You ask me what I’m thinking about.
I am thinking about singularity and that I don’t know who I’ll become if we aren’t evolving together.
48
Symbiosis, ya know. Identity doesn’t come forth from a vacuum; we are impacted by those we spend time with.
49
I try to separate out the parts of myself that are
Me
And the parts of myself that are
Us.
50
I just feel more tangled.
51
Your last night here, I make you fuck me slow with lots of kisses. Normally, I like it rough, so I feel it for day. I like it brutal, with bruises and bites as physical proof that we were together. I like a scattering of hickeys to blossom deep red, sickly purple, jaundice-yellow across my throat: Battle scars.
I like it when you say things that are double-edged: when you call me a bitch or a slut.
This time, you call me love. You call me beautiful.
You say, “Riot baby, you’re a psycho. You’re a star.”
52
“We are not finished,” you say before you leave.
53
But! But! You leave me undone.
54
I loved you.
Your ghost stories and the way we’d sneak off, just to the park or to the water front, in the middle of the night to go make a fire and make s’mores and drink cheap vodka and make out.
The way we were always wrapped around each other, always touching.
The way our bodies, separate from conscious thought, used to turn into each other.
55
Now, I don’t go to the sea.
56
Jason and I walk to the grocery store to buy some chips and Swedish Fish. The rise and falling waves, the Doppler Effect of passing car after passing car:
That is our ocean.
57
I spend a lot more time with Jason.
58
Jason and I do the same things we ever did, but it is not the same.
59
We used to talk about what led us to atheism. You said that you believe in humanity and I would say that I believe in myself.
Somehow, when Jason says he doesn’t believe in God, it’s like he’s saying “I don’t believe in anything.”
60
Jason gets annoyed when I point out how a literal translation of this song totally changes the meaning, but the singer is trying to make an allegory about the universe.
“Yeah, I don’t really like Japanese music,” Jason says with a shrug.
61
I can’t stand Jason:
His apathy, his eyebrows, his love of the literal. The way he is when he’s on his meds. The way he is when he’s off his meds.
The way he never laughs at my jokes.
He only thinks everyone else in the world is an asshole because HE is SUCH an ASSHOLE!
62
Jason can’t stand me:
The way I eat pomegranates one seed at a time, the way I only say the beginnings of sentences because I’m not used to having to clarify what I mean, the way I tend to sing what actions I’m taking as I take them.
I can tell he thinks I’m an idiot. We rarely see eye-to-eye.
He says, “Slut! We’re going bowling. Who’re you trying to impress?” when I wear breezy dresses and gold eye shadow.
63
Jason and I hang out in my bedroom, smoke weed, and play video games in silence.
64
Being around each other is just so easy.
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