what am i supposed to give. what am i supposed to say to make you believe that despite all evidence to the contrary, i really do want to live a good life. i do want to be happy. i do want to forget. i do want to let the years and the rain and the bruises wash off me like dirt, to let them soak into the earth and become the veins of some holy rosebush or sage or wild blackberry bramble. i want to be in the desert, i want to be cleansed, i want to light a fire inside my soul. i want a home, and a yard, and a library in the garden, and i want a covered porch, even if it’s small, and i want to always remember how lucky i am to be alive. i want to be heavy. i want to be radiant. i want to be green. i want to get married, but only to one person, and only if we elope. and then i want to run away on a honeymoon together, even if it’s only to a shitty motel somewhere in the low desert, somewhere neon and with nopal and where the pricklies stick to your t shirt if you brush against it. i want to wear t shirts. i want to wear a vintage dress to the courthouse and i want the clerk to take a picture of us on my film camera, the one i got for a criminally low price on the outskirts of budapest at a flea martet i went to with my french friend. i want you to be smiling. i want you to ask me to have your kids, even though i’ll say no, but i can’t ask you to ask me because it isn’t fair. it isn’t fair to want to be loved when i can’t give you the same thing back. but i want it. i want it i want it i want it i want it. and then i want to come back to real life, to not answer the phone for the week and then pop in unannounced back to denver, and when everyone says where the hell did you go i can just say oh, we got married. and nothing else. and then i went to throw a party, later that august or maybe a year or two later, there’s no rush, we have nothing but time, there is nothing in the world but time and us and the trees and the green and the feel of your shin brushing against mine in bed underneath the sheets - that august, or the second or the third or the fifth (but not the fourth), we’ll have to throw a party, but only because everyone has been bugging us to throw one because they all love us so much, and we’ll secretly love how much they love us and how much they want us to throw a party, and i’ll be in the kitchen wearing my black frame glasses and chopping vegetables for a summer salad and i’ll say everybody loves us and you’ll be sitting at the table nearby pouring through one of the old national geographics and you’ll smirk a little but in the smallest slightest way that only i can tell that you’re doing, and you’ll say mmm, yes, but not as much as i love us, and then i will wake up and you will still be dead.
that wasn’t what i was trying to say.
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