Autopsy + Whenever I

Autopsy

Our chatter remains a bare corpse that I still perform autopsies on until this day. I do not know why I cannot remember most things that we laughed about, but it still rings faintly in the back of my head like a funeral bell. Every word birthed into the air was with intention, and I never lie when it comes to you. I hold the memory of you in my hand like a dead daughter, caressing it fondly and wondering if it really ever existed, if it really ever was within me. Time shared felt like an intangible dream epochs ago that I cannot longer trust as real. I prod at the remnants woefully, turning them over like a coroner desperate to know the cause of death — fragments of warm skin that has cooled into something unrecognizable with the passing of time.

“Were you ever really there as a witness, or were you just a creation of my longing?”, I wondered as I punctured your abdomen open with my dull blade. All I found were hollowed-out organs, a heart that weakly beats and a mouth that no longer kisses. Your veins, emptied of warmth, no longer carries the same pulse that used to call my name. I rummage through your love, dissecting the existence of what was — but all I found were tattered arteries — a love that has been retold so many times that it starts to feel like an old myth. Now you lay barren on my autopsy table as a memory stripped of uncertainty, as a body without breath, an anatomy of my loneliness. I set down my scalpel. There is nothing left to find.

Whenever I: Epilogue

That winter night, I sat crouched on my bed. I was drafting a letter. Or the ghost of one. I am more elaborate with the written word than I am with my tongue, but that moment caught me — I had been caught by my own written mouth. Numb, it was. The ink dried faster than usual that night, and my hand was heavy with the weight of love that had never been quite real enough to survive the world. Bones whimpering, I raised my pen again to defile ivory — but my hand went mute. Somehow, it acted like it had never learnt the art of language, mockingly adopting the fluency of pretense.

I dress the memory of you in silk, though you are merely just flesh. Flesh that makes me cry. Flesh that screams loudly for my presence and goes mute the second I appear. Flesh that pulses desperately underneath my skin. I tried to write your name again, but it bled into the page like a wound reopening. It rejects the idea of you, in a prowess that my heart could never.

Sometimes I wonder if I just conjured you just to have someone to mourn. But you were real, weren’t you? Real enough for me to leave. And that is the cruelest kind of what if. My love does not have to be loud, it is a gentle pulse that I hoped would traverse across seas. The sea did not carry my name to your shore, it swallowed it. But flesh remains flesh, and a heart remains a heart.