my therapist asks me to describe an apocalypse

my therapist asks me to describe an apocalypse

so i talk about the brown in your eyes, and your face in history class. about your wildcraft bag and your arm around my shoulder, sleeping next to each other in class but never really saying a word. i'm high on your morning voice and giggling all the way to school. every day that passes with me staring at your empty seat is a day i'm planting the grenades for the apocalypse that came soon after. every day that i roll your name around my tongue and smile is a day i'm readying myself up for the cataclysm to come.

we're kissing behind closed doors and you kiss like jeff buckley sings. we're lying naked on the floor while you bite my collarbone and i could swear i almost started loving my skin for a hot minute. apocalypse plays in my head, but i still wouldn't believe it if you said we weren't going to make it. we're playing house in someone else's apartment and making salty noodles. i'm kissing the water beads on your neck and wearing your initials around mine. marrying each other made sense right then because the poison in your tongue didn't exist. there was time to dig out the grenades and leave a perfect thing as it is. there was time to stop the world from collapsing. time to stop it all.

the apocalypse starts with us fighting like our parents and spitting out sharp poison. we've both become our mothers, even if we hate ourselves for it. i'm talking to a suicide helpline who's asking me to describe three things i see. i don't tell her about the blood, the scissors, or the chunk of my hair on the ground. i don't tell you that i'm feeling blue again. i don't tell you that i'm emptying your room in my heart. most of my memories are blurry from here. i dont remember how it happened, but i remember how i felt. the blue house with the beige walls became blurry in my head. the future nostalgia didn't have you in it. i'm pushing my tongue down restrained men. and spending an april crying over it. you're spending yours trapped in grief and a bitter aftertaste of an epilogue we wrote so clearly.

when my therapist asks me to describe an apocalypse, i spend a good forty minutes talking about you. how, the grenade blew us up into shreds and left a piece of you in every inch of me. how there were no fires that burned bright after, just the slow, cruel erosion of everything we thought we knew. how i wear your silence like an old sweater, familiar and worn, but never warm enough. or how i remember thinking the world ended but waking up everyday to a world where you didn't belong to me.

so when my therapist asks me to describe an apocalypse, i tell her how im living in its afterglow, burning in the shade of your eyes. i talk about the poison in your tongue and trying to convince myself how it didn't belong there. i talk about the pit in your cheek and writing war memoirs and having to set fire to your room in my heart with cigarettes. how the insides of me rot everywhere and my appetite absconded. how all the colours in my face left.

and how you watched it all happen.

nibir/a valiant roar, a bland goodbye