A Little Death
Location
1.
A lab report lays on the table, a chart with a name too familiar
It’s a picture burned on the back of my eyelids, a friendly reminder of how much I managed to fail you this time, how much I grabbed at nothing only to be reminded that
I am nothing.
Call me a doctor, call me a saint, but I will never be anything
more
than a man without direction and a dying best friend and too many
pretty blue pills to be entirely functional.
I know what these words mean, know what it is to have a terminal illness, what it is to have a degenerative brain disorder but
I don’t know
how
to fix it
Study a protein strand.
Cry. Study another.
Cry. Wipe your hand across the top of your eye and remind yourself that you wanted this-
this being late nights in a lab with relationships that can never last and a life that means more to you than your own waiting in a bed you’ve laid in more times than you can count.
2.
Look at me. Look only at me.
I can fix this I can save you please please believe me, I can
I know these words don’t mean a thing to you, medical terms describing nothing but medicine and not the lives it can tear apart
but believe me when I beg you to look at me, to trust me, to cry on my shoulders because I can handle what you can’t.
I can fix this.
Trust me.
3.
Except I’m only as strong as I pretend to be and lately my imagination is growing
cold
a doll laying forgotten on the side of the road, one eye
missing, hems torn. she’s falling apart.
i think she kind of looks like you.
4.
I had three dreams in a row last night,
three dreams, three dreams, three dreams.
In one you were dying, in one you were already dead and the other
was a compilation of
a little boy crying that his father is dying and there’s a clock that runs out of time and the father
dies
it’s strange, the little boy kind of looked a little
like
me.
5.
I don’t want to think about these things but lately it’s all starting to feel very much
out of my control.
I’m stuck between the dream I had before I remembered you and
the dream I had before I met you and
I can’t tell if these are different
things or simply the things I can’t be bothered to
remember.
6.
Don’t tell anyone
But
I love you.
And a little death won’t stop the feeling, but it sure will
put two fingertips to an open flame and tell the fire to
breathe again.