"The best way to get over a woman is to turn her into Literature," Henry Miller says. It's also the best way to get over a man.
And curiously enough, I find that it's also the best way to turn lovers into friends. The best way to bring about catharsis. The best way to gain perspective, so you can let them go without cutting them off. And for someone like me, whose memory is ridden with gaps and holes, whose emotions must be written down for them to coalesce, it's also the best way to remember.
I want you to remember me. But even more than that, I want to remember you.
So I'm letting you bleed into the lines on my pages. I am writing you on skin. Poetry on the nape of my neck. Hieroglyphics in the contours of my waist. Slanting metaphors upon the small of my back, etched indelibly with the heavy, sharpened point of you.
I pluck a memory of how we've entwined and distill it in ink on paper. I write about how we've tunneled through flesh, how we've burrowed inside the caves of these bones. A gift to both of us, I think, this snapshot taken in heartfelt, viscous prose. It is a memento of who you are at this moment: love may take her prisoners, but the gray can only take her souvenirs.
I have woven you into story now. I claim this tiniest piece of you for myself — a secret medal hung on my wall, a tribute to a hard-won, tenuous prize.
And in this quiet, as you sleep, I venture to hope that even years from now, when my name fades unwatched into a string of other names, when this snapshot becomes only someone you once knew, you will still remember us, and all this, with sweet nostalgia, with a lingering, wistful smile. I hope that you will remember me with fondness. That you will remember me at all.
Originally published on Tumblr, April 2011.