when i was a middle distance runner

you're a wolf boy, get out of this town.

when things were clear

a story i wrote that is less fiction than it is simple breath:

"Can you just leave, Salem?"
(Like it mattered)
Those words hit me like paper bullets, honestly, barely making it through the air and bouncing right off my shirt, landing on the floor in a pathetic crumpled heap that reminded me vaguely of crushed lilies in the springtime. I know those words were supposed to be heavy and violent (there were accompanied by such a ferocious slamming down of books, lord, your aura was flying everywhere) but in reality, they were nothing and I frankly wasn't surprised. Not like I knew the brunt of your rage (I've only heard) but I just expected those words, I knew they carried so many different meanings. And I probably should have left your echoing house, your cold room, a while before, anyway. But I just couldn't bring myself to extract my presence from yours. Sitting on your floor, reading Cortazar (another one of "your" authors, as I still think of them - Klima, Marquez, and Eggers, too), I wasn't content but I knew I couldn't move. I was leaving in less than two days (something new, for I used to be forever in a perpetual state of latency) and I wanted to, in simple, lay language, spend as much of the remaining hours I had left with you. I forwent a going-away party of a friend I'd known since kindergarten and skirted spending time with my family to come to your house (on the behest of your father, but still) after you got off work (those long shifts just killed me: so many of our temporarily final hours lost) fuck well anyway this is no time to be mad to teach lessons i can't sacrifice another minute quite late for a school night, and what's more is that I knew full well that it wouldn't evolve into anything and that I'd just sit on your floor reading, wondering in the back of my skull if my silent and statue-like presence annoyed you at all, wondering if it would have annoyed me had it been the other way around, but what made me content to do just that (nothing I couldn't have done anywhere else) was that I was content in doing it. Time with you was richer, more golden, full of light and cool air and pulsing chests and a strange heaviness that began at my heart and spread exclusively to the tips of my fingers, allowing the rest of my body to be lighter than all summer air.
I knew what you were asking me and all the reasons why. That is what you had become to me: a solved puzzle. Let me:
a) "Can you just leave, Salem?" was Look I'm in a really shitty mood right now and you're the person I feel most comfortable with which is why in times of stress I let down my polities and you receive the south end of all my current negative emotions, which are usually in no way related to you at all. Which I accepted, because I understood her so thoroughly she might as well have been a nursery rhyme (but god she was so much more beautiful).
b) "Can you just leave, Salem?" was also How I have grown to feel about you in the last few years has been tumultuous. You have seen the everything of me and have been there for all and you are my best friend and grew to be far more than that, and I ended up - knowingly but almost begrudgingly - loving you more than anything in this entire world: your hands in mine, your fingers in my hair, your lips on my neck, your weight on my chest, your whisper in my ear and the fact that in a countable number of hours you will no longer be mine at the end of my hand but a thousand miles away (returning? will it be the same?) and I cannot bear that fact it is tearing me up inside and shattering the ocean inside of me and part of me thinks that there can be no pain greater than this, the pre-longing, the knowledge that though you are here now, you will not be soon, oh so soon, so very soon and I know the eyes of your heart were dripping with tears which is why I accepted and how I understood and why your words to me were like paper bullets because oh, my love, how I had never loved anyone in the subtle, all-engrossing way that I loved (and continue still to love) you; I am incapable of loving anyone else; your breath, your words, your eyes, your embrace is paralyzing.
"What are you doing?"
Your fingers were tracing my cheeks, my eyes, my ears. Your touch was illumination in my dark bedroom. The sheepskin rug tickled my naked back.
You closed your eyes and exhaled jaggedly through your nose (you had been crying) and I felt your warm breath and wished it was mine.
"If I try hard enough," you whispered through sparse tears in a rare moment of tenderness, "I can memorize your face."
"Oh my dear," I kissed you. "All I have to do is think of the one thing that I love the most and your face just appears."
"You're not supposed to say that!" And I could feel you crying just a little bit more and do you know what, my one and only true love thus far? Your tears fell into the soil of time and where our hands met grew this beautiful rose that I call the us and yes I know for now we cannot both hold it and admire it's pretty face but whatever wind and sea exists between will keep it as lovely as the day we pulled it from the earth and held it between us, carefully avoiding the thorns, knowing we'd soon share it again (but for now my dear you keep it, and I will return soon, soon, oh so soon).

So can I at last say that I love you, that I have fallen in love so deep and heavily that I fear death from this drop?
Yes.
Yes, yes, yes, yes. Goddamnit, yes.

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