Your testimonies are easy now. You swear to god and declare to family and familiars about the man who didn’t handle the wildness of your emotions or body properly. As a rule, you’ve told the story many times – the first three or twenty times to yourself – me always the exception – over and over to a requiting rearview. You gave me your harder years. You don’t get to hang me. You won’t hold any apologies over my head while my feet dance beneath your fingers.

Weren’t we busy? Weren’t we figuring out how to make it look like we were surviving on our own? Busy driving hours to meet just to fuck and fall asleep and wake up grinding our teeth on compromises? I died from you in the strangest places, watching you pick the weakest parts of me to wash down. You didn’t even blink and I stumbled. I crashed once. You didn’t inch. I was afraid I’d never forgive you for not showing up as plastered as I did and I started building the box in which I eventually buried you.

I was plaster.

You cuddled your dreams in your palms and I made them come true.

“I love you” was an overture to anxiety. You gave me years of uncertainty and I threw it back to you or regifted it like the colognes I take home to my dad, knowing he’ll find greater use or at least pretend to love it until I leave then tuck it neatly in his sock drawer until I come over again. You were unsure how to balance who you wanted to be, who you needed to be, who your parents raised you to be, and who I saw that night we couldn’t find a place to sleep and decided to swallow drugs on that West Virginia mountain overlook. Scorpion grass dripping from your lips could not have made you more beautiful. Or maybe you were just more like me – high and completely honest and failing to keep up with moments while fighting back tears harder than you fought back telling me you felt unloved – not by me, but them.

All our lovers stitched cracks into our softness and we watched them comfort us like blankets in the middle of the afternoon. You knitted in the early mornings before work and fixed yourself by yourself in the years after me, but you give credit to the man who’ll only have to love you through these softer years. Your deathbed groom. There is no integrity in that, but if you’re lucky, the tapestry needles can be quartered with your wedding dress, the picture of us kissing in a hallway at a party, and the other beautiful things you never have to see again.

In your dreams, disquiet was there. Next to you, outside, was me.

Gently, I held your ponytail over a toilet while you offered up the drink you needed to settle your nerves after your insecurities drove you mad, then drove you to my apartment. I wish someone took a photo of that. I knew I’d fall in love with that memory if I could make myself forget all the shit that happened after. I did a lot of lying. We survived each other. We were hard.

You found someone. There are years between us – me and him. There’s a therapist between us – me and him. There was no one between us – me and you. When you look back, was there anything between us? He met you after you took your grandma’s advice and learned to not need a man. That advice broke you and it’s okay that you weren’t okay, but I need you to tell them you weren’t okay with me and I loved you anyway. Tell them how I met you after years of bad advice from your mother who never spoke when your daddy was around. She spoke softly to me when you weren’t there, her words softened by the hard laughs jammed in her neck. I wish they made it out. She told me I was funny, but gave no proof. I wish she knew how to go to the store without a man. She could have given you more. She’s miserable in that marriage, “but at least she doesn’t sleep alone at night.” I hated you for seeing it like that.

I never wanted to wake up and say “I love you” to someone I didn’t. I knew how to leave you.

You were sometimes gold and sometimes blue. I was mostly me. You were sometimes you. I was always some boy you knew you wouldn’t marry, wouldn’t bring to your parents’ house twice, wouldn’t be soft for. I showed you a box that would fit your armor and sharp tongue when war dulled you and you tried to bury me there instead. I knew you as stone.

You’re soft now because all the harder parts of you flushed down the toilet in that bathroom we never got around to putting a light in because we weren’t sure if all the blood was scrubbed from the under part of the seat or if all of the best of us both was flushed. Just the same, you moved to the smaller room and let your roommate live with our ghost. You’re soft because I never showed up for you when you were unmalleable. It was never my intent to mold you, I just needed you to dent a little under my thumb to know you were mine. I never felt you were mine enough. You mostly belonged to a place I could never see myself in and to a people who loved you for who you told them you were. They loved that about you – that gold part. Lucky them. Lucky him. Don’t rust. We never found what iron could do.

I was wrong, you were wrong. Don’t change.

You were sometimes tungsten.