Horns were enough

Wraithlike-sheathlike black clothes and a pair of devil’s horns. Raw emotion cleaved the mist of alcohol and wasted sweat. Eyes that swallowed the costumed shadows slashed through the pandemonium and gripped me, more of a shearing force than tension; you were trying to tear me apart.

My heart sank until it was low enough for you to step on. The spring in your step masked why your step had a spring, if it was despite, or because of the extra weight from an escorting military officer, whose arm was continually discouraged by your hand.

Equivocating, niceties, and then—

Are You Okay

This second time, you held my hand firmly. desperately.

cradling bones more than anything, as if you could see the future and knew. coruscant glass eyes. a syrup voice suddenly water. the voice you used when you held my hand the first time.

please talk to me please come outside my tacit pride.

I watched you walk into the kitchen light which exposed your horns as synthetic. There was no devil, no demon, not even a villain. Just a person, who looks a lot like my best friend, who grips the side of their shirt when they blame themself.

When

that you felt invited inside, that I could call a strawberry moon that draws scended sand over the line, that you could know that jumping in with two feet is jumping in with ten toes, that I only know peonies from rosettes from roses from mistakes that I’ve made, mistakes I blamed for specters and déjà vu echoes until asking nostalgia if it got off on glorification or crossed fingers.

Two times

Once, we held forgotten hands like two snakes in the winter in the back of a burrow, thumbs unopposed to reassuring strokes or lengthy soliloquies, or promises of someday, “ .”

The other time you grabbed mine so I wouldn’t step into nonexistent oncoming traffic, and I heard brass rings and dvořák romance on almost broken strings, and I saw two eyes on their knees pleading with a pedestal that just couldn’t be me. I hugged you under that streetlamp, looked down, and saw one shadow.

Illusion of choice

I fragment midflight, as the heights upon which we withered pass: a mountain, a minute, the speed making light of a red-eyed flight and the lovesickness contracted from rising to an occluded occasion. The peaks in the window form a jagged mirror, exposing my kaleidoscopic feelings for their splatter painting origins in clumsy rotation, the torque just enough to separate a hypothetical heart from its idiomatic sleeve. Your ghost could still stop me from leaving, it could even land the plane— but so could we.