Graphic by Gill Kwok
In Conversation with Paul McCartney’s “The Lovers That Never Were”
I am not so effortless in the ways you will never love me, this loss is mostly a landscape, a pain I have known before your time in my own, it’s the text from you I will never open – “I don’t feel the same way” was enough to make me hate me. I’ve haunted myself time and time again, and it is not your fault I was born a ghost. I am paler than the girls you usually pine for, anyway, and I understand how hard it is to love a fatherless woman, how difficult it is to navigate this rotten world beside a dirty bitch like me, my teeth cracked crooked, my skin greased with generational grime, your beloved, tree-lined suburban paradise versus my mother’s apartment complex, my history is written in blood that bleeds dry on her walls and on mine. This sour inconvenience I have created, making you a character in a book you didn’t know you were in, maybe it is time to burn this book until its ash becomes dust bunnies, maybe it is time to let go of what is gone and let it stay there, maybe it is time to let time be just that, maybe it is time, maybe.