The Eighth

Maybe the injuries weren't past all cure.
No luck lasts; yours might not, too long, stay estranged;
Some things that you still loved might still endure.
It was all different; that, at least, seemed sure.

-W.D. Snodgrass (Mutability)

It was inevitable that I’d write this. That I’d have to write YOU.

If only to purge you out of my system once and for all. I was gathering all the things that have passed from your hand to my outstretched hands. At the darkest part of my closet still hangs every article of clothing that you ever wore where all traces of your betrayal seeped its way into the stitched fabric that also reeks of my reticent pain.

I am attempting to wade through again the stacks of letters that I stashed in the box, to read each word for the last time and watch them dissolve into a black blurs against the creamy white papers before I use it to light the flames on every memento that this relationship ever acquired exactly eight years ago on the eighth day of the eighth month.

This would be the funeral pyre that would exorcise every remaining vestiges of memory that had stubbornly lodged itself on every folds of my skin through the scars of wounds that would never quite heal because of the scimitar blade that slices through it every time I would feel the space in my cold bed.

Funny that I would turn to Voodoo in destroying you, how I expect to be rid of you while the fire dances and licks my skin as each flick of the wrist guarantees more ash that I will have to sweep in the morrow.

I have been battling you, my angel-turned-demon, for two whole years. For two whole years I pulled out every sliver of shattered pieces of memory that you calmly left, without so much as a backward glance.

How easy it was for you to turn your back and walk away. Traitors should be banished to Cocytus, ironically, to freeze in there forever but who seems to be banished now?

To curl up and be fetal is not enough to ward of the chills, not even in the refuge of a stranger’s embrace can melt the icy pain that was brought upon by your leaving.

I fervently wish by burning these, this dragging and painful journey would finally come to its end.

So maybe then I could finally let myself melt away like a candle burned to its wick until the wax hardens again, and the only remaining remnant is the curl of smoke that is rising up to be inhaled by someone else.

Me, to be inhaled by somebody else.