NEVER TEAR US APART

apartment bathroom on 23rd & Guerrero, San Francisco, CA autumn 2008

It was 2:45 a.m. We were laying on the floor in the living room, encapsulated in blankets and deep meaning. We were talking about each others' identities and the sharp corners of our personalities. Our conversation was like mass: reverent, almost holy. 

Then that song came on the radio like it was a choir coming in on cue. I heard it come on from the very first note. I felt the minor chord shift into a depressingly progressive higher chord. The music marked my insides. I am currently living as body split in two. I am here now, but tomorrow I'll be gone. I'm hopeful and tense as I am loathesome and limp. So when THAT song came on the radio, I felt it. I felt it in my teeth, in my candied eyes, my sweaty-palmed hands, and my honeyed blood. My heart sank like a broken vessel. 

We both knew it - what the other was thinking. We were sharing an eye in that crack of an instant.  Our heads slipped inside the same frame and we saw it bright and heavy. We saw it together. It's a tight wind knowing exactly what the other is thinking. It's a hard light of brass tacks beaming into the holes in your mind-plate. The light particles peek in and it's like you've just seen six white suns. 

It was an honest moment. 

She said, "I don't even want to think about it right now." Neither did I. But the fact is that I hadn't FELT it until just then. In that moment in the living room with THAT song playing and our shared cell of cognizance, it hit me: I'm moving away. I'm going up north... "following my heart"... 

Whatever that means. I AM following my heart... in one direction... and then I'm completely neglecting it in the other. I am on the bullet train to God as I'm Autobahn blasting to the Antichrist. 

God damnit. I felt it. I felt the weight in my chest. i felt the weight in my chest of saying "goodbye". And I felt it in thinking of "nevermind". Change. Split. Serration.

As the reality of changing draws nearer to the dawn, the taste of all that I love and am leaving behind is turning bitter, sour, and sad. I realize I am leaving, but I hope it's not mistaken for adandonment. But that's when you know who will keep you and who you will keep. That's when you know it's real, when they let you go for the realm of never before. Because our sisterhood is sharp and strong, made of titanium and bolted with centuries of armies, it is certain as salt...they could never tear us apart.