Pheromone

I saw the ghost of you, years younger, fragile and skinny as a baby bird, piercings and a shaved head, jeans hanging off your narrow hips, trying so hard to look tough against a world that had fucked you from the start. I wondered about the girl, all curves and sunshine straight to the heart, in boots and black leather she laughed at the jokes you weren’t telling.

I miss everything about you and my body aches with remembrance. Heroin, that black hole of darkness, leading us through the jungles of San Francisco, those back alley streets. The corner tricks and dive bars, the families that took us in as their own, serving up collards and macaroni like it was Thanksgiving. Orphaned and outcast, playing records from the Summer of Love and all of our old friends who died before we were young. I loved you best dancing, hips swaying barefoot to the clamor of kitchen pots and pans, the echo of gunshots and the seedy underbelly of a city that had yet to turn on me. Do you remember when they carried my body out, covered me in white hospital sheets, changed my name and cut my hair?

I’ve been preoccupied by death lately — yours and my own — stumbling through days bright as light and dark as the final hour before our resting place. I see your ghost everywhere I go, your face chiseled into the eyes and mouths of strangers, turning up in my dreams, haunting.

When I go, throw my ashes into the sea, listen to the Dark End of the Street, and think of me.