I’ll be fine, I guess.
So would you.
How soon
depends
on how we broke.
In half? Rough and jagged at the ends
With you clinging angrily to your end and I to mine?
Angry, stubborn tears stinging
in your eyes or mine
That’d be a while
But you’d be fine. I’d be fine.
Or maybe
the courting of Death
Seductive caresses across my wrists and lips or
something sudden and final
In screeching brakes and the smell of rubber tires
denial
and hollow ringing
as I think for the first time in my life
God, I wish I wasn’t wearing black.
It doesn’t matter.
A fight
An illness
A drifting? eventual (we had nothing left in common)
You’d be fine.
You’d remember me in fleeting moments
Flicking past a space documentary on Netflix
or pausing over a box of creamsicles in the frozen aisle
And I would see you
In the golden yellow hair of a passerby
But it would pass every time
One of us might laugh at the thought once we said
you and me
to the bitter end
That a teenager knew what forever and always was
and chalk it up to youthful naiveness
And we would be fine.
But I don’t want to be fine
I want to be laughing so hard my stomach almost lacerates
Because you know exactly what to say
And I want to be pressing
Kisses to your cheek and passing you hot cocoa
Because today we’re staying in and watching Disney
(singing along to every song of course)
I want to introduce you to everyone
Have you met…?
And tell strangers in the grocery store
About the most wonderful thing you did
And watch them smile kindly
over me gushing about you
across the stacks of tomatoes.
And I want to tell you over the phone about that stranger
So you can say
ew, tomatoes.
I don’t want to be fine, I want to be the kind of ecstatic
That only comes from us
From discussing everything from lipsticks to physics to musicals to dying
From knowing that when I am so tired I can feel it in my soul
You will hold me and let me cry
From believing it will always be us against everything
From living happily ever after
Because what is fine
Compared to this?