It Still Burns Me Up

The only thing you ever caught was on fire. Constantly on fire, there it was on your tongue, living in your head and shooting out your mouth. I felt it fizzle and flame when our tongues met but always thought it was a good kind of warmth, something solid, something real.

I was younger then, not so much in years but in the wrinkles and folds of my mind, younger in the fluid in my spine. I felt younger, too. We blew bubbles and rolled in the grass like children. I never had a chance to be a child but with you it felt familiar. What I couldn't realize was that you were not returning to some former lost grace or innocence. You were wearing your youth the way a bride wears a veil – pride, glory, attention. But the veil has to lift sometime. The girl gets married and becomes woman and grows up. But not you.

Your tongue turned to ashes and it painted my body black. I felt so sooty and old but still it seemed natural. I've been living in the dark for a lot of years. I'm not like those other girls, with their charcoal eye liner and painted on sad faces. I know those girls because I used to be one of those girls, before the real trouble hit. Before the house burned down. Before lumberjack turned to withered, blind sack of skin. Before new car and fresh paint turned to new wreck and fresh blood. I went quietly but scribbled a lot.

So we bathed in the dark, in what we thought was art. You said I was beautiful when I cried. I hated that. I knew my face was red and puffy and desperate. I never wanted anyone to see me that way. I always kept three spare tins of face powder in case someone walked in on some private shame, in case I got upset at the last moment before some important meeting that simply could not be skipped, wound up too tight like an old clock and even older man was trying to fix.

And the fire came out. At first it was just smoke, thin and grey but steady. The smell was almost comforting, once again, familiar. I guess I'd never really met any men worth talking to then, and maybe I still haven't, yet. So I didn't mind, not just yet. But it got denser and grey, came out all secretly through the telephone wires. “Is she with you? Where is she?” your voice would meander at some boy across the room. As if I could catch fire with anyone else. As if I'd choke on another man's smoke.

The little pages were nipped and scorched. “I never meant a thing,” you'd say. I always thought fire was supposed to be bigger, brighter. Instead it was just steady and spreading fast. It burnt up the bedsheets and melted silver and gold. It slipped into my notebook and charred love-scrawled pages. It burnt everything in my house save for your voice, flat and hollow. You can't burnt up something that was never there.