Blueish, greenish, the kind that make you wish that you were cool like Tex Perkins, so you would get all the girls, and have all that rough riding ahead of you, and when you smoked it would curl like a blue demon round your hand. Unfettered by the silly inanities of life, you would ride a motorbike, and play guitar like those guys up on stage, you would be cool like Tex Perkins and you would get all the girls.
Instead, as the body plows the water for the morning, you think of things you’re not meant to be thinking of any more, like why the things that don’t bend, break, and how/when it is you’re going to change, because you thought you already had.
With the luxury of delusional time and long heart ache, you remember a warm, blonde chest, curious red hair, extra thin ribs, a deluge of breasts in your hands, the lost fingers of winter, the hangover of that morning, the nausea of the morning after pill, the stupid phone calls you shouldn’t have made, all the bitter, swallowed pills. No mementoes remain so you’re forced to rethink them because, otherwise, while you’re not looking, you’re not going to have any memories any more. Especially not of the seedy things, the things you’d rather you hadn’t done, but you did, and sometimes there were boxes of matches, or cards from bars, or letters, or pressed flowers. A cool stone egg with a story of blue lights on the bridge for some stupid stoner. A kiss in an alleyway underneath where she used to live, all the protestations of drink, so fake, so forced. You just wanted to be another first time and you’d have fucked her if she was going to be proactive about things, but she wasn’t, instead she just adored you after all those years of not being very nice to her. The why why made no sense.
I have nothing to remember you by, and forgiving my sins with forgetfulness sounds so lazy; I whisper into the mossy rocks at Angkor Wat, my lips pressed against the cool and wondrous stone. I am wearing a white shirt and you have walked away from me in a beautiful cheong sam.
There is a place in your body where you look like a man and you look like a woman, then a place where you just look like a woman. There is a muscle in my arm that feels like a man, a strength in my thigh covered by a softness which is both and neither, all running in skin to a pebble-nipple breast which is all woman.
Touching but not touching all these parts of you and I, I dived into the water which was steaming up against the snow which blanketed the hills blue-white; children frolicked in a small lagoon with officious warning signs – but none of the children were mine, and none of the children were yours, so we only had ourselves to watch for drowning.
eleanor j jackson 