Free Heat and Transportation

Our home was alive and beating with our vibrant footsteps. We’d turn off the heat and pretend that’d be enough for us to afford rent. Together we would dance, gliding across the floor in our socks, perfectly in sync with the rhythm of the coarse vinyl. There were no wrapped gifts and no Christmas tree, but you’d wrap us in blankets and lay next to me. And no matter how much our breath clouded the air, we’d always strip like the room was up in flames, sprawling our clothes across the trodden floor. We kept the fire lit.

I’d boil tea on the stovetop and imagine the pot’s whistle was a steam engine signaling its arrival. You’d smoke weed on the couch, the train coming to life with the inhale of each hit. The engine’s steam emerged from your foggy exhales and thickened the room with the smell of earth and cedar. Your scent. And the crimson ashes that burst from the dying flames were just rail sparks from the vehicle, slowing to deliver coal that would replenish our fire. But that train drove you crazy enough that you got on and left. Maybe that’s why it’s called a locomotive.

It’s all still here. All of it. The fireplace, the stove, the pipe. All unlit. Now I pay for heating, but the house isn’t warm. Our flame was extinguished like the end of a blunt beneath a shoe. There is no heart amidst the hearth. And I could burn your memory for warmth. But the room would reek. Of earth, and cedar, and you.

Carbon chemistry.

I thought we were diamond,

but we were just coal.

December 2016