/ DAY 44 /

SUMMER’S GONE AND SO ARE YOU
SEE THE SKY ELECTROCUTE
A THOUSAND BOYS THAT LOOK LIKE YOU
COVER MY EYES ELECTRIC BLUE

Even when I was cold, I was alive. At 3am, I’d escape my sheets. Watch your hair tussle and shake when my neck’d brush it away as I rose. Pray’d you wouldn’t wake. You weren’t going to understand why I’d fucked with the cuddling. I used to stand in the line of sight mirrors and trace my hand on my heart surgery scar. Imagined my heart blue. An electric blue even when I was cold inside. And I was a blizzard basking in subzero temperatures those November nights. I was sure I’d not make it more than 7 weeks more. I could sense my heart giving up. And when I saw my heart blue, I used to stare down that mirror and pretend I was lighting up my veins with cardioversion. I’d shake and I’d shudder, like I did when the paramedics saw to me. 50 joules of electricity to jolt me awake. 3,2,1. I’d pretend to jump put fo my skin. Cardioversion hurts like fuck. There’s the pain and the burns, but there’s also the insecurity about whether you can trust your arteries again and whether you should feel guilty about the idea that you aren’t 100% on the idea that you wanted to be brought back.

AND I CAN’T GET MY HEAD AROUND IT
I THOUGHT I FOUND IT

BUT I FOUND OUT I DON’T KNOW SHIT

I’d restart a heart that had been beset by badness, that saw love and living as bloodsport. Because everything was a struggle, back in those days when Sprawl II was making its way across the airwaves. We loved Arcade Fire. We loved each other. I just didn’t know how to tell you what was going on in me. And so one night at 3:19am I sent you a youtube link to Sprawl II on your Facebook, and you woke up at 7:18 and told me you didn’t understand. I really needed you to. Because I was getting colder and not even in your touch was warming me anymore. And I didn’t know if that was what it was like to know you were dying or if it was that I didn’t know if I could be happy anymore. And I thought Arcade Fire would be our intermediary, our interpreter. Or mine, rather. Because was I even speaking human anymore? I never was sure. But you kept lookiking at me quizzically, you didn’t know why I’d send you a song about escape. Everything was becoming too much. And you were always tryin to soothe me and I was always then and never since, willing to be soothed. But I knew about 175 seconds into you looking at me like I’d woken up at 3am to break up with you: I was beginning to run away. To become a runner. And you knew it, you’d known it. And I knew it only then.

NOW YOU’VE GOT ME SO CONFUSED
CAUSE I DON’T KNOW HOW TO SING YOUR BLUES

JESUS CHRIST, WHAT COULD I DO?

And when you left, I got high as fuck. Shaking, blistering high. So high I don’t think I knew who I was for 108 hours. And I think I was trying to dim the lights in me. Dim the electric blue, leave only blue. When I could walk again, I aimlessly took my heart and tried to restart it under the streetlamps in Seattle until it starting snowing and then I gave up on being warm. I walked and walked until I thought my heart would actually burst. And on that last beat before the point of no return, I sat In the snow on the sidealk and tried to freeze. To be just blue. Inside and out. And I don’t know what sparked me to move again.

Maybe that I’d miss you, Raul.

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