Cherry

Outside, the trees are perfect. They're flowering, and streetlight leaks onto every petal, soaking over them, more like warm honey than gold. It's almost a cliche, how black and stark and lovely they make the sky look, (like velvet, he told me, sneering a little). But then I get sick of looking at them and turn back to your thigh, your naked thigh, which is a new cliche in white. It surprises me, how soft, like I could sink my teeth in, and I do, and you gasp. You gasp in your white thigh and your white little shoulders.

I know that I am teaching you. You only want what I want: for someone who loves you to hurt you. Later, you will pull my hair, maybe, try somehow to hurt me. Try somehow to love me. You roll me onto my back, and there are the flowers and there is your face and every every every cliche. I reach up and smudge your freckles, lick them off my fingertips. They taste like cinnamon, but maybe that's just my imagination or the pills still tweaking on my tongue. Whatever it is, it's nicer. Better than his smirk, which always left my hands smelling a little bitter, like sour cream. What are you doing? Nothing. I'm doing nothing at all, and then I'd go back to kissing him. But the smell of it would still be there. I didn't know that he was going to ruin all of the better-tasting boys, the cinnamon-freckled boys like you.

And maybe you can tell, maybe you can see that I'm not moving with you, not contained in this black velvet box with you, that I'm flying to all different places, because you almost stop (almost), and you ask if I'm okay. You tell me that I'm shaking, which I already knew. If I move, the trees will fall down, I say, and you laugh at me, shush me, brush my hair out of my face because you think I'm high and rambling. But it's true, and it won't just be the trees. It'll be the windows first, peeling off like old stamps, after which the doors will teeter, stand in equilibrium and fall, slowly, leaving only solid brick behind them. Then the buildings will grind into nothing, sprinkling red dust into your hair, and then it'll all be over, it'll all be falling, the trees and the birds and the streetlights and finally the sky, the blanket-black sky, settling into us and covering all of the corners. You don't know this. I'm not sure if you could know it if you wanted to. So I keep quiet and you keep moving, rhythmically, doing slow and steady damage to my vibrating, unsteady world.