Amaretto
Remember everything that I told you when we were seventeen.
Remember the feeling of that Stevie Nicks song, when your body felt your own and you felt excitement at the possibility of renting it out – for the stretch of a song. Remember amaretto creamer at nine o'clock at night and you and me and our elegant rock and roll word dreams. Body dream. Word dreams. Body dream. Word dreams. Remember everything that I told you then: that we would find our way back here. To that safe, black box of all we didn't know. Remember everything that I told you: that someday, I'd be able to hold everything we would be forced to see and know and feel and experience – that I'd be able to hold that black box in my hand and you'd be able to come back. And now here you are.
Remember everything that I told you. This is the way the damage story ends. This is the way the damage chapter, damage sentence on sentence on paragraph on sentence ends, the one that's been running like a line of ants under your skin since 1998. Skip to 2000. Skip to 2004. Skip to 2013. Skip to 2015. Skip to 2020. Skip to 2021. Skip to 2023. Skip to today. Remember everything that I told you – that Suzanne Vega singing Caramel taste of coffee with amaretto creamer in that glass mug, ruined pantyhose at the foot of our bed, lace curtains overhead, billowing with promise in that still room.
At that still hour.
Remember when your soul felt movement and how that was yours.
Remember everything that I told you.
I didn't tell you everything.
If I had, you never would have moved – all that blood would've scared you. But remember: I can hold that black box now. You and me, finally together, holding a black box of blood in the palm of our hand? We'll turn it into something so beautiful. A rose of gutting magenta blooming. Elegant like a serrated knife magenta – that's what we'll bloom, straight from our battered heart.
We're gonna disappoint people, but you don't have to care.
Remember everything that I told you.
And I'm telling you again that it's true.
