October 4, 2003
Life is Waiting
Why so anxious tonight, my heart? This milk is souring in my mouth, spilling a sickness into my stomach that only his taste can make sweet again.
This feeling is familiar. I remember it from our so-called youth. The end of that party, that weekend we swore could not be matched. I suppose that despite my age I still remain to be ruined by the same simple things.
He comes home and dumps a handful of matches before me, grinning. It could last us until the end of the month, lighting candles for the bath, for ambience in the kitchen, for the pleasure of our shadows joined and thrown against the bedroom walls. I think that I do not need to give my heart words because it can speak for itself, blushing my skin and standing my hair on end, wetting my lips and averting my eyes. It's too hard to live simply, moving towards a certain end which you cannot name. I cannot be the woman feeble enough to think marriage. Yet, I am not so strong that I can cover the tatoo of it as it creeps from sternum up, colouring my neck and creeping into my hairline, planting there a veil just barely perceived.
Michael, I would make you a canvas and paint you nude, and cover you with flowers, and then smother your form with mine. A painting of flesh, a threatening pale; is that a corner of bedsheet or an eyelash, a puckered lip or a dimpled knee? I lay no claim to the artistry of your construction, I seek only to figure you out, to devour your pieces for the sweat and taste of them. I promise I'll leave you as I found you, and not a particle changed.
My heart? This mountain of beating-brainlessness does not know itself without referencing you. Is there an inch of my skin without your print, ink like blood like spit and I've washed but I cannot wash you away. I am a woman made of limbs and breasts and a mind much too like a cloud, all at once stormy and then disappeared altogether. You are a wind blowing through me, but how can a wind settle? How can I hope...?
If I say I want something, it is impossible to be had. So I pretend I don't, I pretend that this path is branching and littered with leaves and we've stopped to rake a pile together. I'm wearing a knit cap and your nose is red with cold, and there is more of laughter than of tears at this particular fork. We're leaping in, now, hands joined, but there is no bottom, and we've become children again. Small enough so that the world still seems big enough for all of our dreams.
You are the first thing I've kept without having to hold on.
astera at 9:47 p.m.