Taste of Your Tongue

I've known it for so long, I can't remember what not knowing felt like. It simply feels like a given. Like gravity. How you know when you reach out to shake a hand, that your hand will connect with another's. Not because you thought about moving your hand, but simply because it has always been there and always behaved exactly as it should. It is a certainty and one that drives the world forward.

The basic assumptions that your legs will walk, your heart will beat, your balance will stay upright as you pass strangers on the street. You simply know. These things are nothing more than facts. And so it has been so long for me with you. A knowledge more instinct than thought.

I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine.

So unwaveringly accepted that to this day it passes through my lips tasting of truth. It is only the examination by my mind of the aftertaste immediately following that first instinctual reaction that the bitterness of doubt can be found. Our lives together are as much a part of me as my own DNA. The name Lindsay wrapped around my cell walls.

And when you stray from an us, I feel the pain of that ripping in every cell of my body. So inconceivable that on first knowledge, it's not painful at all because my very being rejects the concept entirely. But the deep ache, the sense of a dark pit opening behind my heart and pulling it down with the weight of a lifetime of abandoned moments ensures I know, this is not simply a paranoid passing thought. No.

This is genocide. This is the eradication of a future. Our future.

And my dna unravels. And my cells wither. And because an us was a me, I simply become undone. Unmade at the roots. Left then only with the hollowness of unbeing. Phantom pain for an entire life of beautiful moments severed. A constellation of passionate kisses winked out of existence.

And the lingering memory of the taste of your tongue fades to ash and is scattered by the wind.