Shadow

Forgiveness is soft as silk against broken skin, cruel as kindness undeserved, rough as the callouses that paint some semblance of passion in wandering streaks across our drunken nights.

You remember the sun on your unmarked skin, the burn of ice as your fingertips turn dark like dried fruit, like the night that took your shadow, like the anger that shrouded the others. After that, water never scared you as it should have, and you'd let it steal your breath when the birds grew too quiet, and the house was loud and crumbling into a mountain as bitter as your own broken family. You were not a boy for many years then, though they called you so, and used much more.

You prayed your little brother couldn't see you in the water, your body still and perfect and unimportant, and the ripples that caressed your skin were sharp as cigarette smoke as you looked up, up, glaring at the sky through a veil of mud-brown.

Oil coats your lungs now, and carries you back to the river, to the pier, where you stand holding hands with a shadow. Your hair has greyed, in some feigned protest against that quiet which you'll never forget, and your smile is wicked and perfect and fragile. You press your arm into mine, and I feel everything in the weight of your touch, I feel the water woven through your words and catching in your throat. I feel the apologies you've choked down like pills, in deft defiance of emotion, in favor of broken hands against my waist. And it's too easy to let my own hatred suffocate under your quilt of earned wrath, too easy to take comfort in the familiar aggression that leaves me torn like vintage cloth and stained with streaks of river-water that dry too fast.