Towers

I left my skin at the door when I met you. Even as a child, my doubts and insecurities held onto my gut. With icy fingers, I froze from the inside with nothing keeping me from the cold. Cold like running home from the last swim of the season, knees blue with shivering lips. Cold like the winter winds that came too early this year. Cold like the back of the freezer, you know how your fingers hurt when you hold something from back there?

My fingers always hurt.



I remember comparing the sizes of our hands. Palm against palm, your fingertips soaring above mine. You curled them over mine and I marvelled at my insignificance.

‘Like the stars, you know?’ I started.

‘Yeah’ you answered, absentmindedly.

I’d lie down on the grass, looking up at the sky. Somewhere out there, a star is dying. What will happen to the dust? Will it go to form another life, someone like you; holding in your very composition the heartache of a fallen star. The ancient aches and pains: the aged wisdom of one who has seen the birth of the worlds. Sometimes I could see that wisdom in your eyes, only glimpses though. It was reflected when you found beauty, so visceral, so fleeting.

'Isn't it sad how everything dies?'

'Not everything. Everything can't die.'

'But it does.'

You had watched a documentary about what happened at the end of a stars life. The professor went on to say how one day, in nine billion years or so, our sun would begin to die. It would slowly grow larger, swelling with the weight of its existence, until all the planets surrounding it are consumed.

'That means us, too.'

A red dwarf, you said.

'Then what comes next?'

It stays like that, for billions of year, until all heat has left it, and it diminishes, turns white, silently glowing until it is no more than a ball of matter.

'That's it. A ball of matter. That is what is to come for our sun. The sun that gives light, that scorches lands and makes plants grow. That gives summer afternoons and winter mornings. All gone. Nothing.'

One day, all stars will end up like that. All destined to become nothing more than dark masses, floating away from each other in a universe that men once marvelled at: that it could expand so continuously, so consistently.



But that's for forever ago.





You said you used to find my hair everywhere. I never told you, but I found your heart everywhere. I think you had lodged yourself in my eyes, everything I saw held its traces of you. I once wished that I could become blind, so I could finally forget you. The morning would break and the mist would rise and although it burnt my fingertips with its beauty I found that I could see clearer than ever. But I still squeezed my eyes shut and stumbled about with arms like antennae, stubbing my toes on stones, on steps and broken memories. But I still preferred it this way.

I didn't want to see the sun. Or maybe I didn't want to see what the sun could show me; every place you had seen with your eyes, force-fed, second hand into my mouth. It didn't matter if it tasted sweet, it was still yours to begin with, and I couldn't take it now.


I once told you that I felt too much. That I had once made myself the promise to walk through life with hands outstretched, even if it meant getting hurt. You said getting hurt could only make one stronger. Now, I fear that if I get any stronger I’ll turn to stone. Stones, like the broken shards on the cold seaside up north. Like the ones we used to climb on as children during August storms. Wet through, stumbling home, caught in our own world and unfazed by mother nature’s extreme show of passion. Placed in front of the fire by sensible hands, see the steam rising innocently from our clothing as we sat, dozing in front of the flames my father had made. Is it only the men who know how to make fire?

That house burnt down, three years after my parents decided it was time to move on, seven since I had left its comforting eaves. Fire, burning the places that once held our memories. The wall where we grew, marking each centimetre with graphite acclaim: caught up in smoke. Everywhere we once hid, told secrets, laughed. Everywhere our feet once stood, now stood burning. Like our house was mimicking the sun.

I will consume you, so you will not have to deal with my absence on your own.



My mother says I should forgive you for leaving me behind. I know she is right, that I should try to let go. So I try. I try to let go of the smell of springtime in your step, the hazel green timbre of your laugh, the way you used to poke me in the side. I try to let go before it gets too late. Before the sun and its fire come and burn where we once stood, before the trees fade to ash, before hearts become scarred and broken. Before we turn to stone, I let you go. Even as I stand on the wrong side of time, moving ever onward, I wish you peace. Before the towers that lined the pathways of our life decay, before all turns to dust,


I wish you well.