Elegy III (Texting You)
James Bowden
1.
It was your birthday yesterday, and I slept warm
as a button after all of our drunk banter and play.
I slept, happily, having spent seven hours carving
a gift for you–seven hours I’d have rather spent
with you–and getting to spend an hour and a ha
lf with you under the pretense of giving it. A
welcome morsel. You texted me a selfie of you
crying right after, having read my card. In it, I
wrote what I am going to try to convey here again.
2.
You have a new boyfriend. We know this. It is
nobody’s fault. None of this is. My existence,
our closeness makes him uncomfortable. As it
should. You don’t spend much time with me
as a result. Even though the time we spend is
wonderful. Even though I ask for nothing but
closeness. This is an old story. A decision will
be made. There is never really a decision to be
made. There is no other version of this story.
You have known my decision for a while, now.
3.
Darling:
this is really sad and I don’t think I
should be telling you this now but I
don’t want to not
Omg u always stress me out when
u say stuff like that
no not stress
but I had this wonderful dream last
night and idk was doing shit with
people whatever whatever and I
woke up and the only concrete
thing that stuck with me was that in
the dream you were texting me
more frequently and of your own
accord and I almost went to check
for some google form i thought
you’d sent me
and anyhow I was quite happy bc of
that and then I remembered to be
sad eventually
:(
I’m sorry
that is sad
don’t
but yeah
4.
I want
you to know
many things.
I want
you to know
that today I keep finding myself falling into
counterfactuals. Daydreaming. How things
might be. How we could make it work this
time, if we really tried. We can make it if
we try, Bill Withers blathers.
I want
you to know
how much there is I would like to share with
you that I cannot for fear of imposition.
I want
you to know
that I went and came, eyes closed and
probably in 30 seconds, and it was the
best I’ve had in quite some time.
5.
My roommate told me that we were bickering
again last night. That you yelled at me, in front
of all of your friends, that at least you’d found
a new boyfriend, and where was my new girl
friend? The answer is that: I prefer to sit with
my pain, marinate in it, know it, rather than
drag an arbiter into it. You (yes, you–)
should know that doesn’t end well. I was cer
tainly too intoxicated to tell you that. Probab
ly just happy to be yelled at by you, again.
6.
I keep wondering what the right words are. I
tell you often that I love you, though we (for
the time being) understand it to be platonic.
I tell you that I miss u. There’s a dream I have
in which I love the world, no, in which the
world loves me back and I feel it and I believe
it and that (that) is why it is a dream. When I
asked for space, I didn’t mean like this.
Everyone knows that you can’t write your
way out of grief. That grief never turns into
anything but grief, and OK, I can grieve you
forever. But I wanted you here, in the middle
of my book. Yes, a complaint about what I lost
and what it feels like to lose you. But also, you.
Your teary face. Your texts, even though dreamt,
wholly lighting up the morning until my conscious
could kick back in and realize: you’ve gone
7.
You already know all of this. But here:
I’ve organized it for you, for myself,
to relieve my mind that I may turn
to other tasks that need doing.
I did not write all this in your card
because I was not ready to. I typically
arrive about 9 months too late. At
least. You know exactly where
to find me, even if you’re 9
years too late. hi
More of a therapeutic poem than a good poem. Drawing from a bunch of poems I’ve loved: Mikko Harvey’s “Wind-Related Ripple in the Wheatfield”, Jason Schneiderman’s “Elegy VIII (Missing You)”, Cameron Awkward-Rich’s “Meditations in an Emergency”, etc.