Keep

I had not thought musicality could corrode a person. But maybe anything felt deeply enough has burnt its own path there.

My mum wrote a paper once on trying not to try, and it’s totally one of those things you don’t think about until you do, and it was probably the best thing that happened. I mean when we stopped. I mean when music stopped being the thing we were trying to do.

When I check up on you you're even in that cavity between air and breath, and isn’t it funny how some days are so easy that you can put out of your mind what it’s like to have to remind yourself of the in out in out in out in and I count these days like I’m trying to stop trying to find you, but part of me knows that as you diverge from the you I've learnt the less I'll squint to see you.

It's funny how everything is brighter with wet eyes. When there is no in or out, when the tears are neither in or out, there just is. I want to say I miss that for us, but can you miss a place once everyone has been taken out of it? I watch people tear themselves apart trying, and I want to say that the darkness won’t wait for you, but the Sun always knows how to find you.

And now when I think of you, when I follow the raw gin burn down to where I hold you, all I know to say is that the birds will always be there for you, and if it will soothe you, I am still looking to soothe you, even though there was only a short time when I was responsible for the shapes your mouth made.

I remember standing on a footpath in the city watching a marathon remembering you saying Do people know they don’t have to run marathons and then you started running and I tried to cheer you on and then I just wanted to get to uni.

Nothing has burnt through me deeper than realising too late that I’m meant to limit myself? That I’ve reached a new level of self-obsession now and I wonder if I inherited that, too. I still catch myself wondering if that’s because we tried music (and it never waits for you), or because you tried to stop yourself, or because I was meant to know when to roll over and float and in out in out in out in out in out in out in I have found that humans cannot sink faster than once they realise their weight.