“Tell me the stories about how we were young.” If we are too old to smile, then he smiled. He reminds me that we do not take place here, he says it, but we were never young. Things empty in a way that reminds me of a wish. I would not say that his look is worry, and in a moment he is the other face god has placed over my feelings, I know it myself; longing.
“We were nine..” he begins to tell me.
“Fifteen”, I say to him. He nods and says it, we were fifteen. I smoke. It is something I have told myself all of my life that I would do. He does not for the exact same reason. Everything is right about the air, the light, the room, this room, gods great god-damned room. We are sitting because all great stories are told sitting, and if not for that reason, then the reason we are sitting is a slave to it. I remove my hat again.
“..and we have not yet known the love of who we are” he finishes. I nod to him. He continues. The sky is purple like a scarf. We are done with sunsets, the world has moved on. I would be fascinated if I was someone else, someone younger, farther from god. Instead I look at it like I do my face in the mirror. I do not hold its gaze anymore.
“The sky was like this you see..” He points. I smile. Was it ever any other way. Were we ever different. I love him. He lays his own hands upon us like the same god we have emptied from within. we are there now and forever as we have always been, and if he says there is a night coming then I believe him. I cannot be lost anywhere but he is the one who says it. “..and we were never apart”.
“If we say it is so.” I tell him. He knows. He nods his head.
He is crying the way all old men do, the way I do. “..and there was never any loneliness..” he continues, a shock of ravens tear the sky, the huge, untouchable sky. I remember where we were when I said it, when I told him, when we tore apart like a comet, like love entering us. I keep our two worlds within me like one grave, ONE grave. I enter it. I live there, I live because I have always been dying, from that day and for it.
A nurse, a woman, checks on us. Our dicks and vigor removed for different reasons. “I would have you on a table in there tonight if you had met me when I was younger.” But she has stopped listening to me because I am no longer funny, and when she leaves, “I have never been the man we know I am, and you have never wanted to” and he listens to me say it. His face is down in some private grief I have only taken but the smallest part in. “I will not let us die like this.” I tell him, I shout it, I demand it from him.
“I know you won’t” he says.
I watch the sun go, tired of us, always an agenda that one and what an entourage. “Do you think we have ever captured the stars?” but this is my opinion. He states it like a fact. Inside gods cruelty is fiction. I tare at dreams made real in my body, a raven, alone now in the sky gone night for the thought of it. In the morning he is dead. I will never survive this.
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