New Memories

Your eyes gleamed that day with mischief.  I saw you picking me out of the crowd long before I ever reached where you stood.  Our magnetic poles once again syncing with superpower force.  Gravity still holding us down but not apart. Out of the corner of my eye I saw your brother register that it was me, surprised by this reflection of the past.  He kept hedging a look, silently questioning, piecing together the deja vu of it all.  Condemning me for lifetimes of always finding my way back to you.

I tried to remember years back, just how it was you used to looked at me.  But the best I could recall was one time in my parents' kitchen, how you lifted me onto the washing machine and kissed me until my last sense had long fled.  You always had an intensity.   Seeing me in ways I don't think I was yet capable of seeing you.  I'd give you more credit for that now.  Now I know that you say what you say, create the moment and life as it is needed.  Did you always do that and I missed it?

On this day, I felt it as my smile wrapped you up, knew my eyes were snapping with expression.  My heart opening a channel as we matched each other word for unspoken word.   The observers read more than either of us would have liked.  I reached out to touch your arm just before I turned to go so that later, when I wanted to remember, I would know that it was real, that I could trust the memory.

100 Words

i knew the moment you arrived.

as best i could, i kept my eyes closed 

and my breathing steady,

joy made my pulse quicken,

desire, my heart skip

i came here, inclined to think 

that you might too.
unlocked our door of secrets.

anticipation keeping me awake

constraint keeping me pretending

the lights are out

i didn't want you to know

until you found me here,

burrowed away where the world 

doesn't know to look

i've dressed for sleeping

so you might 

peel me away in layers.

you laugh softly to find me here,
i smile back in the dark

Longing

"I love you and I hate you."

He asked if it was as simple as all of that.  And of course he wanted to know what the future held.

"The whole world" she said "is caught up in love and hate.  So I suppose it is as simple and as deeply complex as all of that."  She released a slow sigh that had long grown roots in her heart and blanketed the world in its stillness for a moment.  "As for the future" a pause to look him in the eye and see if there was deceit or longing there.  Most definitely longing.  For they were both well aware that they stood in a doorway between their worlds.

She could feel the pull of all their prior lives together.  They played in images shaded by grey, pulsing, sometimes crisp and sometimes impressions of what could only be felt, never to be seen clearly.  She could imagine them with such ease, bodies colliding with energy and tenderness.  Touching, pulling away.  It was difficult to keep her desire in check.  Nor did she want to play her hand and give the future away.

"The future belongs to the moment in which it is lived out."  He closed the small space that had separated them.  His breath heavy along her neck, raising the hair there, she refused to move nearer nor would she back away.  His hands brushed the sides of her abdomen, making her weak in the knees.  Yet she stood. Wanting to open and give it all to him, the way she had imagined that she always had and once again would.  They were in territory that could destroy everyone on the other side of this looking glass.  He brushed her lips and brought a feather touch of his hand to her cheek.

No longer could she recall the others.  This portal was theirs.  Here they could meet in dreams and defy all laws of time and space.  Wisps and echoes of millenia coursed through them, lives in which their bodies had writhed and moaned together with harmonies as sweet as honey and as dangerous as a swarm of bees.

It was hard to rail against such history.

Embers

She said she'd remember tonight years from now.  How they sat under the stars in the backyard.  On an unusually warm October night.  Watching the northern lights glow green hues across the sky and listening to the dry spruce crackle and pop as it burnt to embers.

She thought about those souls that wander the earth, unloved.  Yet in her own life, love abounded.  A wellspring without beginning or end.   And tonight her heart felt like it was radiating right out of her chest.  Humming with the fervor of the universe and humbled by such a noble gift.

Mutations

I've decided that I'm going to keep loving you anyway.  Even though it is changing.  And perhaps by saying those words last week, and you know which ones I mean, I severed all that may have been future-possible.

But the future is both a short and long ways off.  And like all futures, takes turns that we never expect.  And life is not really full of mistakes and miscalculations ~ but rather opportunities to be beautiful in different ways.  Beautiful in pain and transfiguration.  Beautiful in joy and opening the heart to things that most of us are afraid to dream about or imagine.

So even though I'm transfiguring.  Morphing into shapes that hurt my body and mind and squeeze my heart in previously unimagined ways.  And make me doubt a sunny summer's worth of dreaming... I'm going to keep my heart open.  To you.

But also to the rest of it.

I don't Know

I don't yet know how to go on.
I thought I did.
But I don't.

I don't know how to make a life.
Without you.
And I feel like I've been.
Cut in two pieces.

And those pieces are weeping.
And bleeding.
Yet are whole alone.

Foreign Languages

She said, the thing that was the heaviest, most significant, grave even, to learn was this:  Love doesn't alway have a feeling.  Or at least feelings that you still recognize.  So often it is silent and maybe even a little dull.  Its language becomes so familiar, we forget that it ever made your heart race trying to understand its unique dialect.

Love is simple.  Its when you go to bed and your foot drifts under the cover to touch him.  Or you curl your back into his side just to steal his heat and he reciprocates with a kiss on the head.  Love is picking up milk (and that special chocolate he knows you love) and taking out the garbage.  And seeing your person across the room at a party and knowing that you'd introduce yourself all over again, if today were the first day.

I have known real love.  Not the make believe kind.  But the kind whose language you forget you know.  Love that withstands all kinds of storms and leaves you ravaged and wrecked, but still worthy in his eyes.  Protected and safe and warm.

And I didn't know all of this until it went away.  Was removed.  No longer extended.  As though a web that I've been carried by just suddenly disappeared.

And lonely is like I never imagined it could be.

Sad.

She closed it down.  No visitors allowed.  And realized that what she needed most was a private space to grieve.  It's not easy, loving and not loving.  Wanting and not wanting.  Always being between these spaces.  In the gap.  The slice that separates the sides of the coin, so that one never knows if they are heads or tails.

You've gone.  Driving.  Hurting.  Thinking.  Away from this house of uncertainty.

And I'm here.  Wondering.  Missing.  Tired and half dead.  Feeling the ghosts of who we were, in other days,  hiding in closets and slipping down the hall to the bedroom.

I lit a candle for you tonight.  In honor of the multitude of things I love and have loved about you.  Begging myself not to hurt us this way.  And yet on I go, unable to turn back time nor (deep in the recesses of my heart) wanting to.  I don't know what comes next.  I don't know how to breathe.  I don't know how to smile or laugh.  I have no idea how to be anything but numb.

Right now, all I know is how to let the wind whip me and the rain pelt me.  And to be tired but not sleep.  And hungry but not eat.

Tonight.

On this cold dark night, wet with rain and abandonment, she stared out the window.  And had no words.

Damn You

She said she went in search of you.  But you eluded, as you always did.  Showing up on your own timing, expecting the world to bow down and make way.  As though you were Caesar or Adonis.  Demanding in your swagger that she imagine all of the ways you were capable of moving over and through her.

Untitled, Unwritten

I know I'm getting what I want, she said through a cleanse of tears.  I just wish it didn't feel like I'm losing so much.