14 - Gone

I leave before the smell returns. Something neither of us wanted again after the roof, the first one, after we left home. I leave him in a way I think may hurt him still after death, the one I gave him, as though the room sees him, will see him still, in a shameful way, a helpless way, indefensible, cowarded, the way I feel.

I remember someone some long time ago telling me, warning me about being lost. What happens, what you think before you say, before you honestly say to yourself, fuck, I have no idea where I am. I know where I am.

I check the place I took that asshole from, like I would see gum wrappers in the shape of an arrow or seeing pebbles or scuffs that my mind would turn into that same arrow, that magical recognition not knowing the mechanics of finding someone. There is no arrow real or imagined and yet everything seems to say, he went that-a-way. What kind of fire would he light by himself. whould he even of went to see the man he saved, the man I later killed. Where would he sleep. I am atop another roof, a higher one, at sunset. The roof of a building I would not let us enter, it being the obvious landmark. I am there now, waiting for what I think may be an accidental signal, a carelessness by him that will call me like a neon sign. There is no fire. There is NO fire, not one, and as I slump dramatically against the low roof wall, still imagining some audience, I hurt for real, for the first time since losing him, and I did lose him.  In the place where fires should be some hope against all this loneliness remains only the dark that same hope would have driven away, calling even accidently to all. I am here.

Without him I must build a fire for the aching cavity of black within me, my fear returned in full having waited, and patiently, so long for this.  All of it has returned. At it, squinting into phantom whispers and footsteps I eat the bread of never really having known my brother. It is the coldest food I will eat in my life. I tell myself that I will eat all of it, another grand gesture to that same invisible audience. I don’t. I pile it at his feet, his leaving, and though he couldn’t carry it if he were here, I call it his. Each day I sit in greater stillness a scream inside me for the burying of it and wish the wish of a crazy man, swap words in a tireless adjudicating noose of words, the what’s and the I wills, all of it terrifying, all of it killing him.

I tell myself I will mark the day by shaving, or by never shaving again. I make solitary pacts and cut my thumb and always hold back. There is poison in the bread. Though I call the water clean there is an oil like the oil on the cake pan, always there though maybe and most likely not enough to do what I need it to do, let go, stand between us, kill me.

I can’t find you. You leave me like a dream. You’re far away. You’re always there.