unrequited

I put my lips to your forehead. And we fall asleep like that, with your one arm around me. To look at you as you sleep, the color of your skin. I know every cave and crevice, every back road and ravine, but I don't know where I could hide you from myself. You're tired. You're sick and lonely with all of this, and I don't want any of those things to ever touch you again. It's enough for now you are here. For now. Under my roof again.

Just sleep. It's only me circling above you, wide-eyed all night. Staring at this face in my hands. I miss you. I miss you even now as you lie next to me…

Could I have been mistaken? In this case, it seemed to me that you would be the very man to suit me, and I thought, who knows that there may not be a chance for me yet? But by the time my night had crumbled into dimness, it struck me that my little castle had also wreathed away and vanished.
What I said was, as you know, very simple and to the purpose. I knew quite well that your fancy was elsewhere; mine was with you, perhaps as hopelessly placed. Yet you were entirely free to use me as you pleased: make love with me, make a friend of me -- I was in your hands. There I was, ready to spend my life at your service. That is to say that I did love you, madly and truly, without romanticizing the thing.

You've been well-disposed towards every soul you come across. You love to be loved and try with a sweet artless art to win and charm over each woman that you meet. I saw that you liked me, that you felt at your ease with, that you held me not quite your equal and might perhaps laugh at, as well as with me. But I did not care. My aim in life, heaven knows, has not been to domineer, to lay down the law and triumph over others, least of all, over those I love.

Love? We don't say that word. I couldn't go anywhere without that grief inside me. As if the days to come did not exist. And when it seemed that the grief would not let me go, I would try to remember that night I came to live with you. That night when we balance your body on mine as if you are a boat and I river. I remember how your skin smelled sweet as the rind of watermelon, like the fields after it has rained. Mornings and nights I think your scent is still in me, wake remembering you are tangled somewhere between the sleeping and the waking. How I wanted to lose myself in the deep, plum color of your sex, the skin of your eyelids were as soft as the skin of the penis. To feel its warmth from my left cheek to the right.

A silence between us is like a language. When I held you, you kissed me in the hand. I remember that, and it helps the days pass without bitterness. Does it surprise you I don't let go of little things like that? There are so many things I don't forget even if I must do well to. There was enough to distract me in the day, but at night you can't imagine -- I dreamt of you. When I awoke I was sure your spirit had just fluttered from the room. I have yanked you from my sleep before into the dream I was dreaming. Twisted you like a spiral of hair around a finger. And when you would not do my bidding and come when I commanded, I would turn into a soul and keep vigil in the branches outside your door to make certain no one would do harm to you while you sleep.

The days I would turn from raging fire to coldest ashes, I don't think you understood my reasons. I assume I made no difference to you as youve always prided yourself in being independent. You don't belong to me or to any other woman. Or so I thought.

One night, my heart circled and trembled against my chest and something beneath my eyelids palpitated so furiously, it wouldn't let me sleep. When I felt my body whirling against the beams of the room, I opened my eyes. I could see perfectly in darkness. Beneath me -- I saw you asleep next to a woman, that woman you love sleeping beside you. And her skin shone blue in the moonlight and you were blue as well.

She wasn't at all like Id imagined. I came up close and studied her. Nothing but an ordinary woman with her ordinary woman smell. She opened her mouth and gave a moan. And you pulled her close to you. Then I felt a terrible grief inside me. The two of you asleep like that, your leg warm against her, your foot inside the hollow of her foot.

What did you tell her about me? That I was just a chapter of your life which had already finished? But I am a story that never ends. Pull one string and the whole cloth unravels.

From your silences, I understood I was not to question our relationship. It was what it was. Nothing more. If I complain about these woman concerns of mine, I know you will tell me -- "these aren't times for that" -- wait until later. But I am tired of being told to wait.

You rarely talk. Your way of talking is sudden, quick like water leaping. And yet I know what that voice of yours is capable of.

"You need not to know everything", you told me. It made me feel a little crazy when you hurled that at me. Those words with all its force, how a pain entered my heart like a current of cold water, and in that current were the days to come. You grunt those words like hail that splits open my skin, and I cry against the infinity of the sky when the stake pierces me. And in your mouth, the words were flint-edged and heavy, makes a drum of the body, something to maim and bruise and sometimes kill. But I said nothing.

What is it I am to you? When you hesitate? What am I? Sometime lover? Companion? Whore? Which? To be one is not as terrible as being all.

I've needed to hear it from you. All I've wanted was words, that magic to soothe me a little, what you could not give me. But even if you have the words, you could never tell me. You don't know your own heart – even when you are speaking with it in your hands.

We have never been much for talking, have we? Poor thing, I don't know how to talk. Instead of talking with my lips, I put one leg around you when we sleep, to let you know it's all right. The days to come, I thought, erasing the bitter sting of your goodbye.

Isn't it the way with all of us? We begin by liking universally; as we go on we pick and choose and weary of the things which had only the charm of novelty to recommend them; only as our life narrows we cling more and more to the good things which remain, and feel their value ten times more keenly? And now that I have almost come to the end of my story, that is, of those few days of my life of which you were the story. But if it is for the last time I do want to tell you what a precious and exciting thing it has been to know that you have sometimes wanted to be with me -- the greatest thing in my life.

03.25.03