Love song II: April

Posted on: 7 November 2016 by Bethany Booth in Creative Writing

I buy you roses because I am trying to fall in love with you.
(Only this is a lie, and I am also trying to stop lying to you.)

In truth? I buy you roses because a writer I have never met tells me to.
How perfectly, properly tragic, to be provided this impersonal map to you
drawn by someone else, to be so far removed from one another
as to fall back on romance novel cliches, on the kind of kindness
that looks good on paper but is paper thin. At least they are not red,
I tell myself. At least I am not drawing some metaphor out of thorns.
(This is a lie as well. I am drawing metaphors out of everything these days.)

In fact, they are the colour of the sunshine that I have been missing
caught up alone with you in this room that isn't ours. Jaundice-yellow.
Egg-yolk-yellow, nascent like our shaky trust. I am trying to trust you,
darling, but you make it so hard; I let you dress up in my clothes, turn about
in too-big shoes and look in my mirror at a version of yourself that will never exist,
but still existence holds you captive, casts watery 2am light across your face
as you eat tinned tuna with a brand new cake fork. Only reality could ever be so surreal.
You may look like a woman, but you are merely a fragile collection of parts:
your corners are so sharp; your shading falls outside the line. Messy. Mealy,
like a bad apple. (I can try to forgive you for it, and sometimes I even succeed.)

I dream of you, and in my dreams we are two shining sides of a coin standing on end.
We meet halfway across a bridge, or perhaps in my childhood home: predictable, meaningful.
It is probably raining, too. Probably dusk. I hand you my cellophane-suffocated offering
like a nervous blind date; 'I love you,' I said. (Lie.) 'I love you and you are good enough
and maybe even beautiful.' (Lie.) I stare into your eyes as though they contain some answer,
some retribution for the lies I must tell you in order to learn how to make them truths,
but of course it is only ever my own face looking back, ambivalent.