Imagine loving a sober alcoholic Gemini biker with a chipped tooth.
After you are together for eight months, let that sober alcoholic Gemini biker with a chipped tooth take you out in to the ocean, when the waves are cresting at six feet and you are terrified. You almost drowned when you were a child. He tells you to come out further. Turns his back on the wave, just like your father said never to do. He looks you in the eye and says I will never let anything happen to you, I am not him, you can trust me, I will not hurt you.
So you dive under the wave and he has you in his arms and the sun is expanding through the water droplets on your eyelashes. It’s cold but not too cold and it feels clean. You believe him, and believe that nothing is truer than this moment right now with the salt drying our lips and tangling our hair, nothing is braver than trusting someone despite the past. This is one of the greatest days of your life and you never want to leave the coast or his tattooed heart because this is what is real.
Imagine that you two part several weeks later.
Imagine that he begs for forgiveness.
Imagine that you go back.
Because you remember the beach and that day. And every day in its consistency when you are together, and how your anxiety subsides, just for a little while. Things do change, for a week, maybe, but then the past arrives reading The Book of Power and she is hungry. Wrapped up in memories, she plants a green kiss on his cheek and he leaves you in the water to drown. You are treading water trying to seem like you are swimming but you are failing, failing miserably, and when he finally drags you to shore he doesn’t pump your lungs with oxygen, he watches you choke as everything comes up. He tells you that he loves the past and he is waiting for her to come home and always has been.
So now, you do not even have the past. He took it from you and everything you thought was real. You cannot tell the difference now and ask and ask Could he have loved the present, just for a small while? Does he look at your chair in his house with his dog and think of her? When he looks at the ocean, does he taste you?
You are the past, too, just not the right one.
Imagine this but do not live it.