in the end you want to keep

The last one.

But it’s not the right idea. Nor is it exactly the wrong idea. It’s just not quite the idea you should sit with for too long. You should and soon you will, purge and delete and erase and remove and this will be the final thing that you were holding onto.

Farewell mon petit chou-fleur. I love your gypsy dreams, keep a space for me at your big oak table and I know it won’t be where I’m coming to dinner, but still the taste is soft in my mouth. The buttery gentle braise of ox cheek, or the tart, citrus glaze on duck, the small apartment fills with the smell of good cooking.

See you later my concubine. Dream of my hands sometimes and I will dream of your neck, but when I wake, I won’t remember you and you will sleep and you won’t remember me. We will have both evaporated our memories of each other; other lovers will breathe in those very same molecules of longing and breathe them out again.

Bye bye blackbird. Singing in the dead of night. I was alone in that room, and you were very close by, but it was not the same as being there, in that room.

Adios Amigo. Take another turn around the dance floor, I know that you will always be wandering and fading and receding like a memory. I feel sorry for all the other hearts you’re going to break. Like colourful pottery against stone floors. Frida Kahlo waits to paint you with a terrible demon tattooed on your chest.

See you later, gator. In a while, crocodile. You are either the most annoying man I know, or the most wonderful, and that is a terrible line to walk, a terrible gulf to cross. I’m not the man, you think I am. And neither are you.