Some people say that you leave a piece of yourself wherever you go for that place to remember you by.
Morris Heights has that moment where we stood on top of your building and it rained
everywhere but that microscopic space between us, the spot where your skin turned into mine and I forgot where you ended and I began, the space that this clunky language of mine
has neglected to give phonemes and morphemes to in an oversight of epic proportions. I asked you to be the habichuelas to my rice pa siempre. But forever, for always, ends a lot quicker than it feels like when my breath hangs in that space between us and soon turns into a moment of lost time where a synapse misfired or you couldn't find the right word because we're stuck between two languages, the moment that your heart stopped skipping a beat and instead dropped right into your stomach.
I don't remember what happened, not really. There is a fundamental disconnect, because all I remember is the way you looked at me and said You have a good life, nena. I wish it didn't have to be like this. And why did it have to be? That's the piece of myself that's missing, the piece of the story that I left somewhere on Sedgewick Avenue, maybe on top of your building or at the foot of the bed where the blankets always get wound into a tight ball and it becomes the spot that my entire life seems to migrate to, and soon enough I am pulling out divorce papers and green cards and makeup brushes and my favorite bra and the Yankees fitted I asked you to never take off in solidarity to my eccentric desires, Metro cards and that feeling they call kilig in Tagalog, the feeling that you got when your hands first wandered up my shirt, another word this language doesn't have a sound for except the pounding of a heart over a Yankees game and I need to get this moment back. I need that moment back more than I need the first breath I ever took and the last breath I'll ever take.
There is the nagging, pulsing thought that if I could retrieve this much from you, if I could let myself unfold underneath you one more time, maybe I could understand and just forget the whole thing, just let it go in the same way that you let it go and the light from my eyes refracted through your thumos, what the Ancient Greeks called that passionate core you always stiffened against.
You were a diamond in the rough, chamaco, but you just had some more work to do, and we could have been, I mean damn, boy, we almost were. You told me that I was hard, no, impossible to forget and if I showed up at your front door with a bottle of vodka and a smile, would you remember? I mean, really, no really, would you? Would you remember what to call the white light you felt as you pressed yourself into me? Would you remember how to say my name in all your colorful tongues?
I want to crawl back inside of you. What I mean to say is, I'd build an apartment building in your chest if I could and we'd never have to see each other if you didn't want to, and I'd even leave your new girlfriend alone, even though she's me except more Lower East Side than busted up traffic light (I always was stop and go), but you know, you can look into my eyes as we pass in the hall anytime, and they will always be green because if you had asked me to stay, I would have said yes, I would have always said yes.
