Battle Lines

tonight I was a soldier— held together nearly compact, but still hiding the wet tissue from your view. we cannot ever know how much you know since a month ago. how full your capacity valves go. your face close to death looks sunken in like too old fruit and somehow childish. I will never forget that look in your eyes with the machine shooting air into your already food-filled lungs— the panic of a baby who hasn’t experienced enough to know what to fear. your mind might have been lost in that last month, the last night of your life where you didn’t even outlive the void on the visitor’s pass, but I can hold the memories until my brain decides to follow yours’ lead. your breath smelled like something inexplicable— they tell me it was an overabundance of acid but I will always see it as the smell of death. my mother told me not to breathe it like your death was contagious. like it could catch in the back of my throat and blister up until I was a mirror of you. your mental illness was. it streamed through our women as a vial of slick sludge spilled over our helixes, though it didn’t begin with you. you told the nurses days ago— the last trip before this one, the second of your minute thirds— you have bipolar and though I know you’re too splintered to realize it’s me who is that diagnosis, I feel a small victory in you confirming where I got it from. skips a generation— my mother missed that awful bus covered in pus and sick green light— I can see green in your breath while I tell you you can go. it’s okay. you’ll be okay. I don’t know if this is a lie— your life playing out like a PSA for unfit mothers— I am saying the things I want to be said to me. No one knows the life of death and I know even littler— your faculty evacuation is my first time face to face with Death when he isn’t taunting to me to come to him. If I make the eighth decade mark and my mind pours itself out until I am only the beginning of a human, this is how I want my hand to be held, my face to be kissed, the words and phrases my mind will barely be able to string together to be said. There might be something called love between us but now I feel it might be more of an understanding— the way predatory animals of different species know each other’s insides without speaking the same language.

tonight I was a solider— I pet your hair and let you cling to me the way you clung to the exhausted repetition of asking where your glasses were. I let my anger towards those synthetic sugar coated nurses, hating their jobs with the whispering ability of a bullhorn in the hallway where I was two feet away, who let you leave for the hospital without what lets you see— keep me under the tide. if I keep myself underwater no one can see the tears. my mother cannot stand to be in the room with us— I stand guard over your frail body, bone and bone and skin soon to be ash, and watch the heart monitor raise and raise and fall with more focus than I’ve ever expressed. my own breath raising and raising with every incline on the screen then the collapsed exhale. every time it reaches over 140 and you stop moving I think you have also stopped living. finally listened to us for the first time in your combative life. but you are far more stubbornly egotistical than that. no matter how many times we tell you you can leave— pick your bones open and exit them— you keep bolting back. mom tells you she forgives you— for the almost homicide, the entire childhood of neglecting her abuse and perpetrating it firsthand, the adult years of viper accusations and arguments, for every time your eyes went dead with animal rage and your 80 pound body held more strength than an iron maiden— for never being what and who she deserved. but she spares you that final markup in terms— making death easy is not easy and she cares more about the goodness inside her than you ever did.

tonight I was a solider but when you ripped your hand away from mine I knew you were still inside that body and mind that had split apart in twenty places— the sociopath who prowled my life with such a concrete false self it fooled the world into thinking we were the infected ones— that even so close to death with your eyes blurring their colors to milk and red blotches, you were in there. starving for the fight.

my mother will tell me later that you were afraid of what came next—
how you would atone for your life of given grief—
I think you were just planning on living forever.