Bruise

1.
Over coffee, while the dark was slowly spilling over the sky, I told a friend how comfortable I was with my sadness. I said, I’ve always been sad. The man I loved knew that. He learned how to live with it, that feeling that sits beside me. He learned how to make me happy and never demanded that I trade all of it for his love. Which is why each time that we were together, I have never been happier and sadder in my life.

2.
In my music player I have eight versions of Bach’s Air. When I’m feeling sadder than usual I play all of them, all day long. Once, he asked me, Why do you love it so much, this piece? It’s so simple. Not even a notion of grandeur, what overtures are made for.

I said, Because it is all of the poems in the world put together. Because it is a long walk in the park beneath a sky without stars. Because it is dreamless. And most of all, because of its name: I lie on my back and I feel that I’m listening to air, to the sound of other people breathing, to the sound of your lungs exhaling, the sound of my lungs inhaling. I love this piece because this is the closest I can get to being under your skin. And this kept him silent.

A few nights later, with my head on his chest and Bach on the stereo, he thought he was giving me a surprise. Being half-French, he whispered in my ear, Air is just the French word for Aria, darling, and nothing more.

That is the most cruel thing that he did to me.

3.
When sleep eludes me and I’m too tired to chase it, I sit on this chair and write bruised declarations of a past life. I walk barefoot into the kitchen, open the fridge and look inside it for a long time. I turn on the TV and mute the sound. I stand in the middle of my room and look at my hands. I long for a window that isn’t there. I recite some lines from a Philip Dow poem:

Hunchbacked
by his heart
swollen with dreams
of wings, of girls whose breasts are antelope
trembling beneath the lightning
that seeds his spring: he hears the boes
of their unborn children
growing.
In his heart hut he lives,
a mute
chewing crimson flowers
to make speech, to keep
saying
what does this do
to save my life?

His words stall for time,
slave for the mortgage on his bones:
he knows he is a fool
who cannot solve it –
yet, goes at his heart over and over
repairing: with jellyfish, lame horses,
whistles, white cords of his body, white moths
seeking colors, damp alleys,
odors of knives,
trees, stumped, putting out tiny wings
of translucent new leaves anyway.