This city, it reeks of you; every place I go, the smell of you fills my nostrils, pulsates, like a heart beneath the floorboards, with your ghosts. A teenage boy with a mountain bike waits at the cross-walk, and he is you, vibrant and thirteen years old, camera in tow and a Hawaiian Punch in hand. I love him. And down the road, there walks a man in a camo jacket, a wisp of his blonde hair catching in the wind. I love him, too.
Sometimes, I wish I knew some other way to love you, because this way, the cost is too high. It has always been that way, ever since I met you; you became my world, and now, everything is you. Here you are, arranged thus-and-so, there, arranged thus-and-thus, in a shock of leaves through which the rain pitter patters atop my head, in a sunny day that echoes with the sound of a motor on the highway, the warm wind roaring up your sleeves.
I'll be seeing you in all the old, familiar places, certainly, but, like Nina Simone implored, "Where can I go without you?" There's nothing that isn't inflected with you; every new experience is, somehow, already a story told to you, and everywhere I go, I am amorous and pained. Would that my God were a spectre in the sky, that he might be killed in the theatre of my mind. But mine is a living God of blood and sin, and all the better to love him, the God I can touch. And all the harder to loathe him, the God in whose flesh I am damned to dwell.