16/08/26 - WISHFUL THINKING

Before I leave, I want us to take a photobooth picture together. I want to keep it in my wallet. I'll thumb it until the glossy paper frays. I want you to kiss me in the final picture. I want to see you smiling with me. I will meet other people, across the ocean. I will fuck other men. The picture is for the loneliness of after. I'm neither here nor there. Stuck in a purgatory I think you know all too well. I imagine a few days before I leave, I will see you. We will sit by the water's edge, facing the river, like we did the first time I met you in person. We will hold the same cans of alcohol. It'll be late at night, and the river will look like it has thousands of glittering shards of glass. Like swimming it in will slice me every which way. I'll turn to you, timidly, and ask you, "Can you kiss me?"

I won't ask, "Can I kiss you?". I want you to do it. I want your agency. I want one kiss to tide me through the arduous journey. You'll do it, because there will be nothing to lose that you weren't already going to. It will be sweet. Maybe I will cry. And then we will dance and dance until our feet hurt. And you'll grab my waist from behind and I will lean into your neck. Smell your sweat. I won't call you, or text. I will effectively disappear. I think you know that too. I'm never good at processing emotions.

Or maybe you won't. Maybe you won't have time to meet me, or think the photo is stupid or tell me, "I'm not going to kiss you. We are not drunk enough, there's no music and there's people milling about. I only love you when we are all alone." and I'll say: "Yeah, that's what I thought. Thanks anyway." Instead of a picture, I'll have a memory of a memory and it'll become so perverted and garbled I'll think for a moment that you were a figment of my imagination. When I come back, I'll see you at a gig and you won't even look my way. Maybe not that last part, because you're too unbearably kind for that. But maybe you'll say hi, having forgotten the 13 months spent together, and the 7 months spent away. Maybe I'll be a new person, and you'll love them more than me now. Or maybe not.