You were there with a stitch in your side and a fist in your gut and sharp stars screaming through your forehead, filling you up with light and pain. You were there, at first, with your heart in your throat, but something startled you and you swallowed it, and then who the fuck even knows where it went?
You were there on the porch carving toothpicks with a pocket knife, not because you needed them, or even wanted them, but just because you could, just because it was something to do with your hands.
Those hands. Those hands. Those hands.
Something to do with those hands to stop them remembering all that they knew.
You were there when I came home. I saw you from across the street and stopped dead. Stared like no one'd ever told me not to in all my life. I felt like a highway with too many cars. There was this shuddering weight, this terrible speed, this artificial thunder, and flow as unstoppable as a freestyler's rhymes on a good night. And I could hear the highway too, everywhere, the purr of it filling up my ears until it spilled out into the rest of me.
You sat up straight and gave me a look that meant nothing. Then a nod that meant the same.
I thought about going home to someone else's house. I would have done it. I swear, I would have. Walked right into Anna May's and fl0pped down on the couch just like it was mine. Worn her clothes and drank her gin and made love to that boy with the chestnut eyes and chipped tooth who was always hanging round her place. Never missed a beat or glanced over my shoulder. Anna May could find somewhere else to stay, because I sure as hell wasn't going to walk up to the porch with the whittled whittling girl on it. No no no not ever. Well. Maybe not. But sure as fuck not today.
And right then you said, "Hey"
And I didn't hear you; you were all the way over there and I was on another planet, but I saw your lips move and I knew, and before I could stop myself I said it back.
Then I said it again, louder, so you'd hear me with your ears, not just your eyes.
And I thought: Fuck. And: You've got to be kidding me. And: Well now what do I do?
You said, "Come on over then, and have a seat," like my own porch was yours for the offering, like you'd already had the idea about taking someone else's house, and already acted on it.
I sat down like a kid in detention. My throat already felt full of chalk dust from writing the same sentence one hundred times: I'm sorry I did what I did to you.
I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry.
I wish you had made me write it. I'm often complimented on my penmanship. In high school my wood shop teacher once me told me that he'd never seen anything like it. Actually, his exact words were: "You have beautiful handwriting. It's like nothing I've ever seen. I mean, it's borderline crazy-person handwriting, but I like it." He smiled to let me know it was a compliment. He looked a bit crazy-person himself, his teeth alternating black and white like a game board. But he was a good man.
Not like me.
You patted my knee and I cringed with all of me, blood and bones flinching just the same. It felt like stepping on a jellyfish. I closed my eyes. There was wind, suddenly, damp on bare back. Then there was something else; your hand on my knee. Tender and terrifying as a kiss of death. I didn't know what to say.
What you said was, "Patrick."
Just that.
But on your lips it didn't sound like my name.
