through the valley
It’s you and me in the upstairs of your family home. I’m someone not-quite-wanted but we’d all be remiss to pretend I wasn’t once important to you - if only because I was the first girl you’d held after the Big Heartbreak of Your Life. Her lips still phantom-touching yours, I thought the girlish taste on yours was just a consequence of my favorite lipgloss. There’s hardly a dapple of moonlight striking the handrails up the stairs we’d tip-toed up, but I can see shadows of you and me, early twenties, wondering how much time we really had left.
Time for what - who knows? But here I am now, the ghost I once assumed her to be. You’re in our room, a new girl in our bed; she’s holding you in quite the same way that I did, but you’re so much more relaxed. She feels me there, ice-cold glass cascading down her back. Wondering what it would mean to say ‘it’s been six years now, does that mean to you what it does to me?’ Knowing that it doesn’t because I don’t haunt you in quite the way that the [original] ‘Last One’ did. Quite the opposite. Call Me By Your Name, no; Call Me By Hers. It’s the only way to matter.
She goes into hysterics, asking why I’m still around. You feign ignorance but we both know I’m there because you were there too. ‘Love Me Tender’ on the turntable, back when your bed was lengthwise along the windows in your room; we dozed off at five a.m., you gave me your shitty leather bomber jacket and dropped me off at home with sleepy eyes and pin-drop sighs. (Back then you still had hope that you’d love me like you did Vanessa.) The new girl leaves beneath a ceiling of tears and it’s you and I in our room again. Made brand new, one thing leads to another, time stops - the English language demands that I call it ‘later’ - until you admit it again.