My body remembers wanting to forget you. I think that is why love doesn't happen the same anymore. You tore into something. I have skin that sings love. It's never felt quite like my own. Hymns that began in church, a pleated skirt with alterations. Hymen and hearts and cracked feet, too. All broken now. God didn't watch with eyes then. He feels. You all around me. Coming into me. He knows transformation.
I didn't want the baby the first time I felt in unfold within me. You had told me to keep your distance and now here you were all inside of me. Growing, transforming.
Your mouth is full with barriers. I didn't know what you meant then. But I felt myself trying to undo whatever it was that couldn't let you in. My mother once raised me to dream in fragments. She said loving in wholes leaves too much to be lost. Immigranty is hoarding the intangible.
Where did you learn those words? Withholding? Absolutes? They feel unreal.
I think there is a galaxy growing in my belly. How could that be us? Tell me all you kept from me while we were in love. Are you really the universe?
My body remembers everything these days. The warm thigh on the train, the hug of cotton against my stomach. Rust and copper on my tongue. The pennies I’d count in my palm. My first kisses. The taste of fry plantain and dumplings in cow foot soup. Sleep deprivation and helplessness. Dissolution in labour. The tearing.
What it can’t seem to remember is why you left. It knows everything before, everything after, everything in-between. Fragments. There is nothing complete about you. My mother would say it was better than nothing. She held scraps of my father just as other women who had loved him and lost did.
I keep writing the story. It was never about us.
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