he said he wouldn’t walk for me. i wasn’t asking much. no epic journey, just a mile of his time –half alone, and half with me. he said it was too much. he said there was luggage under his eyes, but I knew it was really crowded around his heart. he was always one to travel, though he’d scatter pieces of himself along the way, fearing he’d get lost. fearing he’d lose something. i tried to tell him that it was scattering those pieces that did it; that the smaller he got, the harder he’d be to find. of course, sometimes i think he wanted it that way. there'd be no trail to follow –his bellybutton and collar bone and fingers can’t glint like beacons; no breadcrumbs left in the woods because his body would slink off to hide, taking root in secrets and shadows.

i watched; i waited, but the thought of searching through underbrush and deep, endless thought for a lost eyebrow or trachea was too much for him to bear. i guess that was when I knew, although sometimes I couldn’t help myself. sometimes i'd let hope peek its head out from between my lungs: he would turn around, recognize a castaway slice of thigh, and i would feel so much better. like maybe it was sign that he was ready. he was ready to take the world on, to face himself. to love himself. to be whole. he'd reattach it –whatever it was- and take my hand, and we’d be together until it got dark; a few times we’d see the sunrise from the same square foot of space.

but it was never like that for long because i knew. I knew, and he knew that I knew, and he knew enough to fear knowing. so when i told him i'd walk a thousand miles to see him, I knew, in quiet despair, that he wouldn’t even walk one for me. and this knowing passed over me like a gentle suicide, with the same feathersoft whisper of glass hiding itself in graves of skin.

i knew no matter how many times he’d pick himself up, no matter how many winged creatures lived inside his chest, he couldn’t really love me. through his self-inflicted handicap, he was unable. all the years he’d picked himself apart and sewn himself together again, only to rip the threads from his flesh in anguished disgust – it left him with complications, with scars like midnight train tracks. A limp here, a heart murmur there. One blind eye, a pair of foggy lungs, and tragically beautiful hands.

Strangely enough, it was his feet that were never weathered or cast away. Always, even after days turned to months of travelling, he kept those feet. He loved those feet. Baby soft, sandypink – those were his feet. The rest of him, what did he care? He could be blind, broken, battered, bloody, and breathless, but as long as he kept moving –moving with some semblance of direction, in any direction- he would still be alive. Afraid to die and killing himself piece by piece. Slow and steady wins the race, I guess.

Sometimes I had a feeling –real dark and real hot and real strong, like a summer storm rolling in- that he was fooling me. He let me think I could actually have him. That he was mine, that I was his. Maybe I was fooling myself, which is probably closer to the truth. But when our bodies came together in any way, it was like the 4th of July from every year since good ol’ 1776 would manifest itself inside and outside of us: the fireworks, the riots, the cheers, the people crowded by the thousands, even 4th of July promises, 4th of July kisses in the center of the busiest street in town, 4th of July fears, 4th of July sacrilege, 4th of July walks to lovers’ houses after 4th of July sunsets.

We were something, all right. But just like fireworks, just like those beautiful, unforgettable, breathtaking colors; just like those darkscreeching, lightrumbling sounds; just like the embers floating silent like snow until they fizzle out against the cold, night-dewed ground – we were ephemeral. We lived in secret, passionate blurs of time. Now it’s hard to tell if we even truly existed. It’s hard to know whether any of it was real. I guess the only way to tell is through understanding.

We lived and loved like fireworks, and we ended up choking on our own brilliant smoke. Then, right before everyone’s awestruck eyes, we took the most devastatingly graceful plummet to earth where we settled our smoldering ashes like grave markers in a field.