Muscle memory

You ask me to forget you but all I hear is: I’m throwing you into the ocean. I’m asking you to forget how to swim. My body only knows how to love in muscle memory. Just like riding a bike or braiding hair, it took me years to perfect it and I know I can’t unknow it. So, this is how I love you now: in telephone numbers for houses that I no longer live at; in all the languages I can count to ten; in piano pieces that my fingers find impossible to forget.

How strange it is that

our fingers never forgot

how to fishtail braid;

how, after all this time,

our mouths automatically

form the words I’m okay;

how our minds can form the lyrics

to songs we swear we don’t know;

how we can still play every key

to Frère Jacques on piano.

How strange it is that

I always-almost text you

after a round of vodka shots

how my lucid dreams remind me

of the parts of you I’ve lost;

how my grandma still knows

the routine to a tap dance

she learned three decades ago;

how, sometimes, i still

feel you on my clothes.

How strange it is that

if you stare at your reflection for too long,

your face starts to change;

how, if you repeat a word over and over,

it no longer sounds the same;

how finding each other in the dark

is born from muscle memory and bad habits; how, after all this time, you are still my favourite source of magic.

— i know that finding each other in the dark is born from muscle memory and bad habits but who’s to say it isn’t also a form of magic?

and do not tell me that it is habit and not magic that our lips find each other in the dark.