Remnants of our ghosts

That’s the thing about this city, my little heartbreak, it is a great labyrinthic mausoleum of death. Ever since I set foot here, I began to decay. 

The people who passed me by on the streets stole my beauty for themselves, to hoard in their daydreams. Do you remember how beautiful I used to be when you first laid eyes on me? By then, I was already half of what I had once been.

I despised the window shops, dolled up like fashion catalogues I could never afford on a student scholarship and the money my parents scraped up to give me. I loathed the restaurants, with their rich and nauseating smells, provoking floods in my mouth and great big rumbles in the hollow of my stomach when I passed them by. 

I did love the cafés. They were easy to step into because of their simplicity, easy to visit regularly because of the way they offered affordable bread and coffee, the bare necessities for anyone, not counting the smooth body of a woman, that impossible warmth of your bed when she’s in it, the earth-shattering softness of her belly when you dig your fingers in… 

I digress. 

I can never start a sentence with “I was out and about in the town, a spring in my step…” because this mourning of your bat eyes, that never ending bright darkness, haunts me the way every memory does when I wander through the city streets.

The metropolitan is angry because it knows I’ll never make you ride it again, and it misses such a clean, gorgeous being, sitting elegantly on its dirty seats. The bench in the park near your university is chipping away parts of itself because we will never again kiss while sitting there, drenched in october rains, crying because we had been mad with each other and then we stopped being mad and started being in love again. 

I follow your ghost around like a lost puppy following an almost forgotten scent. You are stubborn and keep fading away.

Now, this city is a haunted city and I adore it because I hear you laugh when I step into the right patch of grass and I hate it just the same when I hear you scream when I turn my back, so I don’t. I keep moving forward and that’s how I have gotten to know the hidden parts of this god forsaken brick on brick and how I survived leaving you out to die clinging to the person you thought I was.

Frankly, it is a place like any other, and I certainly believe it lacks charm. It has nothing on the long winding rivers around the small village I grew up in, the wild flowers compelling in their breezy sways and the sun more scorching than comforting, beating the sadness away.

Here, the tall skyscrapers cast shadows on every step, and it is cooling and refreshing and very lonely. 

This city is a fine place to be lonely in. I, however, must confess I have found nothing but the opportunity for love in every corner.

I remember the first time I saw H, lounging around in true decadent style, feet up on a chair in some dingy bar, reading his book like nothing in the world was his concern. I took one look at him and knew I would like to do things which would certainly annoy and irritate him. 

It was nothing like when I had met you. You were precious and concerned and anxious, your scarf was purple and your blouse was dark blue. We ate waffles and I got chocolate all over myself, and yet you still took me down to the Fountain and told me about your grandmother and cried all over your knees. Your kisses were awfully awkward but my face had never burned so brightly, I was aroused at the chemistry we seemed to have so easily.

The Fountain is still there, pumping its water and reminding me of that god-awful note you gave me on a cold evening that said 

please don’t leave me, please don’t go away

I don’t hate this city, but I don’t particularly enjoy the ringing reminder that I did leave you and that I am not terribly sorry for it.

To tell you the truth, H and I don’t wander away much from our little nest. We are homey and domestic people who like to be barefoot and eat ice-cream after dinner (though he would vehemently deny desserts after meals were in any way ever his idea). We snort and cackle loudly at the mischievous pranks we pull on each other. We sleep tangled like yarn.

There are ways in which I love him. 

We walk down enormous avenues and I am unafraid to hold his hand, chest puffed out proud of being seen with him. We are telltale business casual meets alternative goth. I can never find a good store to save my life and he finds his outfit at every other standard clothes shop we pass on our sparse shopping sprees. I give him flowers from the sidewalk and he gives me fond, exasperated looks. I am quite taken with his eyes. 

There are ways in which I love this city.

Every idle stroll is an opportunity for triggers, and I like the way I still remember so much. It makes me feel young and experienced, even if I am mere years out of the chaos of adolescence.

There were ways in which I loved you too.

When we were hiding away from the world (because you were so goddamn afraid of what it had to say, you forgot you had a mouth, you forgot you could tell it to fuck off and mind its business), I loved the way we fell into each other, melting from the heat of skin on skin, unexperienced and clumsy, kissing on the mouth until we were dizzy with the feel of it, entirely out of breath and all too happy about it.

And no matter how much time passes or how many new sidewalks they build, there will always be a city wall with our initials carved on it, one great big heart around them, signaling strangers on the street that this was once our city. 

That this was once our love: simple, but destroyed with the prospect of building something better.