THE BLACK HOLE
I.
You should have warned me you were just passing through. I would have covered
your body in passport stamps. Blue ink on your knuckles; folded trail maps on your
hips and Thailand on your inner thighs. You would have found Iceland on your lips
and Costa Rica on your collarbone. And then, right next to the tense stretch of
muscle trailing down your neck, pulsating with your racing heart, you would have
found the mark from my body, the tiny island that had hoped you would call her
home. Instead it is my skin that is bruised. Your breath branded each vertebra.
Your fingertips stain my knuckles, evidence that I didn’t make you up. I couldn’t
have made you up. I have written and rewritten, trying to find the words to
describe your beauty, to describe the way it felt to have the breath squeezed out of
my lungs when I woke up to find you gone. I have found the empty space you once
occupied. I have found the static imprint of a human soul in my bed. I have
discovered a wormhole in my chest, a place where time and space are tangible. If
energy cannot be destroyed, then what am I to do with this waning friction as it
consumes me in an attempt to fulfill the nourishment you have been depriving it
of? I fear that I have found that Black Holes are made up of lost girls. I have found
all of these things and yet I am still unable to find you.
II.
My friends say they can see a world ending inside of me. What a curious thing to
suspect – that a world exists inside my bones. It would suggest that I am composed
of stardust, that planets roam my veins, that a sun exists to sustain the life inside.
Perhaps they are right. After all, ever since you blinked out of my life I have fallen
out of orbit. I am nothing but space debris, an anomaly of atoms. I am the heart on
my sleeve; I am the tongue in your cheek. I am the car you wrapped around your
neighbor’s tree and I am the scarred bark, deep crevasses fossilized into my skin. I
am the calm and you are the riptide, your fingertips pulling me into the undertow. I
am as radiant as the sun and you are the burn I peel off of my shoulders, shedding
you from my skin. If only it were that simple to rid you of my mind. Today they
discovered that the history of the universe lies within gravitational waves. Imagine
that. I always had a feeling that the history of my universe laid inside the boy with
tidal waves under his skin.
III.
Since falling in love with a Black Hole, I have been living in a reality of a kiss that
never seems to end. My mother has told me that time heals all, but how does that
relate when you’re living in a world where time bends and warps and you live and
relive the same moment over and over and over again? It seems like a blessing, to
be stuck in a moment where you once loved me. But I know better. I am living in a
moment that will soon end and when I finally catch up you will be gone and I will
have no way of knowing where you went or how to find you. In this real-time
moment, my hand clutches the pen the way it gripped the hair at the base of your
neck the night you moaned my name into my collarbone. I am hurling these words
towards everyone that isn’t you in hopes that somehow, some way, the universe
will take my side and will carry my voice to your ears because maybe, just maybe,
you lost me, too. Perhaps you will find me again, a stroke of luck, chance, chaos,
subatomic particles with no set course so why can’t we collide time and time
again? The mathematician with magic in his eyes was the one to tell me about
Tangent Lines, of how they have one chance to meet before going their separate
ways, moving farther and farther away from each other with every damn second.
We’re the same as that . . . aren’t we?
Glint Literary Journal 