Red

The sun burst through that morning as if it nothing to hide. “I am the sun.” it said with such vengeance and pride, my heart skipped a beat. I clutched my left nipple ring, as I often do, when I think about the way your body looked in your red pea coat. The way your body looked in that pea coat at the Tuesday afternoon meeting. You were unapologetic, just like that six in the morning sun. The way you spoke through your red lips absolutely set me on fire. Now, though, you speak nothing to me through those lips. And the silence is like a jail cell. I ache to set them free. I ache to part your lips, help you speak with my tongue on yours. I think our taste buds would rub together like fingers on braille and the words would float into the sky like a bird takes flight for the first time; so wild and free and orgasmic. Your body would become a kingdom at which I am merely a peasant, yet I would make use of every part of it. I would dress up the living room, make cozy the guest room, and I would fuck the living day lights out of you in our bedroom.

I would touch every bit of you. You would whisper my name at every square inch. Your red lip stick would have since evaporated away, but I still know those lips. Those lips are my pipe dream, my main artery, my soul. Like the wings of Samothrace. Your winged victory ignited this world. This passion. My clit.

My part swollen and crying and only, you left. You left. You left. Not the way a bird leaves slowly and patiently. Not the way the leaves fall gently from the trees of Autumn. You left like doors slammed shut, like glass breaking, like me carving “unloved” into my upper thigh with my Swiss army knife the night I couldn't sleep. You left like the way a house burns down unexpectedly, or a heart stops for no apparent reason. You left. And with you, took much of me.

You are only a smoke signal of a memory I can barely hold on to. Mainly because it never happened. The phrase, “I still love you” marks the novel of my everyday. Like a cobweb of my bones, they are settled in the crevasse of my everything. I push my tender legs through life, still. I wake up, I go to work, I come home, I cook dinner, I go to bed with a book and a miller light. But you still manage to seep your way into the margins. I didn't ask, though, you leak in. You are nothing but a dirty syringe. I found you in the pocket of a drunk. I touched you gently, you were smooth to the touch, and nearly painless to my skin. But, when I injected you, God sent me straight to hell on a rickety old railroad cart.

The problem was, that railroad cart vibrated against me in just the right way. Your sin, your evil, your war, touched me only in slight jest, how could I have known the difference? Your lips where a holocaust disguised as a sunrise.

How was I to know?

Merely a human being on a earth of deities. Merely a slave to your every breath. How. How was I to know? I am a big girl, yet have proved to be so weak in the flesh of my own body. The skin, the organs the sinew, in which I live with everyday. I have somehow managed to be captive of my very own self. To my very own name. A slave. A slave. A slave.

And a slave never hears freedoms brush across her ears like the cool breeze of today. A slave is shackled, torn apart, unloved. A slave bows down to the very essence in which she hates.

But, there is a twinge of hope that rests between my lower abdomen and my diaphragm. I can barely feel it, as it is the size of a mustard seed. It only barely sometimes scrapes up against me. Causing my nerve endings to rustle like wind blowing through a soy field. So slight. Almost unnoticed. These words:

what is a servant, but a slave?