Movement

I made a mistake when I painted your copy of Keats on the nightstand.

Your mind was canine, inquisitive, citrus on the tongue, the smell of rain in the warm grass. It was spontaneous yet keen and focused as a hunting dog. Mine is feline; it is firtrees and paisley and undercurrents and symmetry, and it meanders, so when I painted your copy of Keats, I mistakenly painted it as it was when I bought it for you.

I painted the fresh bite of the corners, the pages uniform as a legion of soldiers, I even painted the gleam of light splashing off the green gloss of the front cover, but when I looked up, I saw that my analytical obsession with order had seized my brush.

The book was split open, held aloft on your favourite poem by a snapped plastic ruler. The edges had been rubbed smooth, stroked into curves by your thumbs, the cover ripped, scarred from all those times it had stowed away in your bag. I had held you in my arms as you read them to me, mumbling into the basin of stomach, my hands lost in your hair, both of us becoming each other, listening to you repeat the words I had given to you.

It shifted with you, that book. It softened as you did, melted into your palms and bled into you until you knew every word off by heart.

I had been painting mathematically, like a scientist, driving myself mad with detail, sketching fibres on socks and dewdrops on the sill, determined to ensnare the last few flashes of you. But it was beginning to feel cruel, my attempt to lock a life so rich with movement into one petrified room.

I had been desperate to keep you, just a little bit of you, but I cannot paint the smell of your sun-hot skin, nor the vibration of your voice against the hollow of my throat. I cannot paint the cups of tea you brought me when I slept over, nor your arms around my waist as I stood at the easel, nor your terrible piano playing. I cannot paint the way you made me kind, and I cannot paint the pieces of myself that you took with you when you left. I cannot paint your life, because your life was movement.

As I stood painting your apartment with the grief sitting like a monster on my chest, I began to realise that there is little in life which is truly still.

In the end I burned it. I couldn’t bear to look at it anymore. You were fig juice dripping over the vales of my fingers, you were pink sunrises, you were music, my darling, so instead, I plant flowers. I plant them in your name. I leave them to the elements; I can protect them no more than I could protect you, but I am soothed by their movement.

I watch them die in the winter. I watch the petals slip away in the wind.

Em, 19, UK. Instagram: @the_cynicalpoet. TikTok: @em_crnwll.