Anyone's Ghost

by August Thompson

He told me I didn’t need to say sorry because it wasn’t my fault. I could never understand why people needed to clarify that. That I’m sorry is not an apology from me to you but an apology for being. I’m sorry that life is this difficult. I’m sorry that there’s so much harm to be found. I would give anything to change the nature of the world, even if I could change it just for you.

I wanted to say: Build in me a lighthouse. Be guided by the love I feel for you, for the safety I want to offer. Put knives in your wheels and leave the truck until it’s ticketed and towed. Move your bags into my room and stay. Find a job at a record store, become a security guard at the Met, don’t work at all, and we can live off my twelve-an-hour as you make every record you’ve wanted to. We can take it slow; we can move fast. You can leave me and come back. You can be exactly who you are or you can be what you’ve always wanted to be. You can sell that gold twisted band, and we can find a studio in Queens, and I can cut your hair every other month. Let’s live off rice and beans, oranges when they’re in season. Let’s make friends and forget them for days and weeks at a time. Let’s ward off all of the terror with talk. Let’s make love over and over, until our ribs hurt and we think we’re tired of it, then do it once more, just to see if there’s still life to be made.

Time’s proportions make no sense. It is grotesque, the forgetting, when all I can think of now is life without him.