II.

You called me today. I kissed the screen until your name disappeared. We promised each other we’d be strong, and I’m trying to figure out a way to do that without pressing my hands and feet into wet cement. “Can we talk about exes?” we’d start and we finished the conversation with the kind of O’s people sign onto Christmas cards and moved on to the kind of Oh’s between bed creaks and the neighbour’s we-can-hear-you poundings on the thin walls.

There’s a busker by the skytrain who orchestrates gentle tornadoes in the Parisian sounds of his accordion. I put my arms around you and we danced in the middle of the sidewalk. I remember the way people smiled, tipping their umbrellas and hats. They whispered something in between ‘new lovers’ and ‘honeymoon’, and we laughed humbly not wanting to admit it had already been two beautiful years. I remember Paris. I remember graffiti-ed subway stations and accidentally entering the ghettos and meeting some break-dancers. I remembered there was once life without you and I was always strong and adventurous and terribly sad. I give a dollar almost everyday to the busker with the accordion. The wind carries your cologne every time he starts to play.

I peeled potatoes for my father last night. I had never seen him quite so eager to cook in a pair. He praised me after every dish I washed and called me beautiful between every turn of his sizzling steaks. I think people are not wrong for keeping secrets. I think some truths hurt and are better revealed to strengthen another, but I think there are other truths that have such blinding pain. I think they can tear insides and kill. We could never keep them, you know. Secrets, I mean. We never had the knack to fold them into little notes or paper airplanes like normal people to try to hide them away from each other. It was our greatest strength. But what if we were wrong? What if we saved one another from hurt? What if we saved each other from murder?