Freudian Romantics

Sarah Licht

Tell me all the secrets that lie between eyes drifting to dorm room ceilings, counting cracks in plaster like lost chances, another heart lost to the wilderness. Devoured by wolves or perhaps you could only dream of such romance. You tell me pain is the only proof of existence, the longing we feel in absence, the sharp thorn of feeling your chest burst with nothing to spill from it. Fill me with sorrow like a sponge, and let me carry all the stories of love struck down over a cafeteria salad bar, embraces you hardly knew were the last. Allow me the chance to see what you save for midnight journal entries when the world outside can hardly recognize your face. But never wring me out. No, I want you to fester within me. Filthy and alive and existing until there is no space where you end and I begin. Until then, the blankets between us will suffice, ligaments holding fragments together.

We were never made to be connected pure as jagged pieces. Even I know that I am a side note in your story, a figure waiting alone on a bed for you to enter, something glossed over upon a first read, soon swallowed by time that prefers lives to be sanded smooth. But tell me that I am a piece of your puzzle, that I exist no matter how small. That my absence distorts the image, rips through clouds and erases what should be beautiful. The night will end before you finish, but stay until I’ve guessed the ending, memorized how those words would feel against my lips. Let me remember how wrong it is to wish to be more, for us to exist outside of closed doors, out where wolves run free and wild and satiated. There will always be these blankets between us, my chest filled with mildew instead of life. And yet I love & love & love.