Glass by 7ala Abdullah

You say you’d like to buy
a time machine and replay
that year all over again.
You say you’d do it all
over and over, until it’s over,
until it’s really, really over;
until you no longer get the urge
to lay your head on grassy
landscapes just to look for my face
in the stars. You say it’s gone
and we’re different, you say the only
thing that’s still the same is the way
that music in our chest
still plays that old tune when
we’re not thinking; still plays that
song that ruptures us when
no one’s looking.

But you’ve got that look in your eye;
the one that says you’re not
telling the truth. You’ve got that
look that’s telling me not to trust
what you’re saying, that same
damn look that intoxicated me
that day you told me
nothing would go wrong
and I was just a little “maybe”,
rolled in flesh and bones, so
unsure of whether you
would kill me or save me. And you
sang me serenades of “sure”
and “absolutely”
and you stood beautifully on my
world with your flag in hand,
and that was the day I became
your absolute Indian.
You stormed in on me,
and I loved the rain, loved the way
your hurricane spun me around because
I was a dancer and you knew exactly how
to hold me; arms up and feet off the
ground – you turned me over and over until I
forgot
how stability felt like.

“Fly me up into your seventh heaven
and promise me
I’ll never learn how it feels to fall”,

until I fall for you.
Until I fall for forever.
Until every step I take is another shard
stuck in the soles of my feet.

This is not about you.

This is about me
all parts of me
burnt-out and broken,
perfect and tainted as I am. This is
about the blood
on our hands and the heaviness
in our chests, about the the scars on
our eyes and the stains on
our flesh. This is about
the past that’s been on repeat,
this is about being stuck in a
fantasy. This is about that
broken record
you and I are sick of listening to,
of feeling to, this is about
the desperate need for an unattainable
fix. You say sorry,
but sorry is just another word
I can no longer hear from all the
goodbyes echoing
in my ears; give me sorries in
rays of light because
my eyes have adjusted to darkness
and I’m terrified of how
they don’t miss the sunshine. But you’re
fading and we’re hopeless, and
my fingers are tired of clutching on to things
that are no longer theirs.
We’re fucking beautiful,
but we’re doomed,
and you say
we were meant
to be, but I think
you’ve misunderstood.
You and I were meant to break
one another, meant
to shatter each other’s souls
until there was nothing left
of us that was fragile,
until we were both loose powder roaming
high above the seven seas and the
wild universes.

“It’ll be because
it’s meant to be”,

and I would have agreed
with you before. But you were my sun
and now
it’s night-time, and it’s no longer
you
I long for; it’s the tips of
my fingers
I left buried in your skin.
You say we can get past it,
you say
it’s water under the bridge,
but I can see you sinking
from miles away;
can see your arms
helplessly
trying
to fight the current, can see
your lungs filling up
with water, can still see
that flicker of hope
in your drowning eyes.

Take a second to listen to the words I’m saying,
that’s all I ask.
If you’d just hear me out,
if you’d just please concentrate for once,
you’d hear that ticking begin to slow, and
you’d see that last speck of sand
rushing into the other half of the hourglass
to find its final resting place.

This, dropping unguarded
and uninhibited,
falling with only maybe-nots in mind
this is the hope I had for us.

This, my love,
my lost love,
this is the end of our time.