It's after midnight, and the air outside is Autumn-chill.
Last year, on this day perhaps (I am too lazy to look it up), I wrote of love. The expectation of love. The desire and need that love should find me.
It will be cooler here than the Midwest. Already I have dug out sweaters and heavier long-sleeved shirts. I have layered my bed with blankets and sleep cuddled beneath them against cold toes and morning shivers.
And love? She takes sanctuary in a hospital to find haven from herself.
It is a different love this autumn (but love is always different). And I haven't a language that doesn't wrench from my gut to describe it.
I do not cry for this love, or welcome its coming with giddiness, but rather, sit back and close my eyes, willing it as one would relief from chronic pain.
It is not superficial (I have never loved superficially) but love, itself, turns inward at the wrong moments, in the wrong places.
(Oh my darling Nico. Your love of bunnies and comic books. Your love of theoretical physics. Your love of me.)
Linerally, we do not make sense. We are like two incongruent shapes placed on top of the other--edges poking out sharply, grotesquely. Or even more appropriately, we are a subject and verb that when joined together do not agree, but.
Skipping over the facts to the facts, we are not even a tired metaphor--overused and distended. We are, quite un-simply, us.
There is beauty in what is created when we come together, but it is not the romantized, fairy-taled beauty worn thin into the hearts of little girls right before they dream. Rather, it is the beauty of rest after strain.
She laughs more. I cry less. We don't forgive ourselves, but we forgive each other, and that's the only place we could ever truly begin.
It isn't what she's done in her life. It isn't the drugs or the alcohol or the self-mutulation.
It isn't what I've done in my life. It isn't my flashbacks or faking orgasms to find love or trying to take my own life.
No.
It's that when we are together, we are real most times, and when we're not real, the other understands.
It is not that Nico is magnificent (although she is). It's not that I'm magnificent (although she would say that I am).
It's that we know the same language, and it's not the most pleasant language. It's often gutteral and harsh and escapes from her in sighs too heavy for a body so slight and as sobs from me.
Have you ever spoken pain with someone you've loved?
It's not a fairy-tale.
No.
It's survivors guilty and ashamed of surviving.
No.
It's lovers who met one another at rock bottom and found beauty in spite of bruises and cuts and scars.
This is not a fairy-tale, our love.
But it is real.
Yes.
And I have never felt so vulnerable and safe with another person.
And she will be my last, for I am incredibly exhausted.
I shall simply slip away into the night like summer into autumn.