Your ghost is relentless- an agitator, parked in my periphery. Taunting me, like a gleaming-eyed coyote, a swift and perfect apparition on the street. I am suspicious of you, and you of me. You are my most interesting memory. Fuck you.

I dream you, hard, and wake up with your name on my lips, your bright syllables seared into my mouth, just to swallow my unanswered questions. You reverberate, penetrate, and I am powerless. This annoys me. When we met, I was a delinquent, fighting the high tide of destiny. A badly contained woman, seeking salvation, delirium, distraction. Wounded. I did not want to be seen, not in the way you saw all of me. I only wanted to be noticed. Please, I dressed up just for you. Wore my body like a battle-ax, carved my hips around someone else when enough time had passed for me to determine that I wasn’t what you wanted. And darling, not that it matters but we could have looked good together.  We would have looked good together, like some awful miracle -if I could have stood next to you. But at the time, it was like standing next to a nebula, almost too bright and abnormal. And you couldn’t be honest.

If I had the courage, I would plunge towards you, take all the parts of you- your odd geometry- both bestial and obscene, your holy virtue and hilarious lies, your fairytales and neuroses, your hatred, your warmth- and face it all. Love it all, hold it all. Bring you back to life. Resuscitate your wild, your outrage, your sex.  Fortify your freedom. Hold your hot dreams.

I try to convince myself that it is better like this. You probably would have destroyed me- devoured me. Or I, you.

I should have tried, though. I would have given it my all. No, I don’t know if I could come home to you- if you are the kind of person who would let me fall apart, who’d remind me to drink water, who’d let me ramble incoherently. I don’t know if you can cook, or could put up with my 2 am chain-smoking, my fickle friends, and family dysfunction. If you’d still want me when I sulk, or stayed transfixed in silence- if you’d find my proclivity to research everything endearing or obscene. So I can lie, like you lied, and say that you are better as a flashing star, impossible to interpret, revered from afar. An animalistic and holy apparition, a coyote in a cul-de-sac. Looping in and out of sight, attentive to everything, hellbent on your own survival, and gone in an nstant.