Lovelorn at summer’s end

I hope you fade with the summer

It is the end of another summer and I’m lovelorn, a wounded animal curled up in my bed upstairs. Despite the faint pulse in my head, there’s not much to complain about. Through the window’s gaps the sun peeks each afternoon, alchemizing whatever my eyes fall upon. I keep thinking about what it means to be worthy—what it entails, what it feels like. What goes through people’s heads when they rush to tell you “no, you deserve it” when you only ever hint you feel otherwise? Am I worthy of love? And if so, when did I become it? When did my curled, gilled body metamorphose into something lovers deem deserving? Does suffering in love make me more deserving of it? Are we all panting dogs at love’s door, tongues out, watching someone else flirt with the idea of throwing a treat?

Each morning this summer, I woke tasting of metal. It is the aftertaste of memory, perhaps. Lovestruck, I had been, somewhere in the middle— I found myself in the belly of the beast. I engraved a name into its walls and fed on it painstakingly. Soon enough, a love insect swam its way beneath my skin and turned me lovesick with its fever. I keep going back to it—the feverish thrill, the daydreaming—knowing all too well that the knife of separation will drop inevitably. I think the high lies in the delay. Love is, it seems, my dearest disease; I want its hands to stay deep in the soil of my body.

In Sanskrit, the word smar (स्मर) means both to desire and the memory of it. The womb through which my mother tongue emerges makes no distinction between the two. My recollections of you are interlaced with the desire to be with you again. To watch you kiss through half-lidded eyes, to drink all the poison your lips offer. And then, until the last breath escapes me, to spend every second peering through the thin fabric of memory.

Last week, as I learned to drive, I sat anxiously in the front seat— panic calcifying gradually into my bones. I kept picturing how you drove: your spine straight, chin up, half a smile like you owned the world. I could almost picture the way mauve bruised the sky that evening, could almost hear you say how you wanted to love me once again before autumn began, for the last time.

In his letter to Bosie, Wilde wrote “everyone is worthy of love, except him who thinks he is. Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling.” In some other life, I don’t kneel before false Gods, don’t make altars out of people. This is not that life. My eyes are drooping with something heavier than sleep. Fall will befall us soon, and maybe I won’t dream of you as much this time.