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.

Thou Shall Not...

She said what she wanted to say.  Went where she wanted to go.  Moving unconstrained with airs of simplicity, even though no one understood that.  Few could comprehend her motivations, probably because they were pure or mostly so.  Not everyone can handle freedom, she thought.  Most just want the absence of responsibility.  For freedom you must be willing to stand naked in your life, not letting it matter what the others might say.  She wanted to be and let be.  To embrace that which caught her attention and let go when it no longer served her heart.  She lived all of this with the same ease that the moon turns the tide.

Yet, you remain.  A disruption to the ocean.   She still didn't know how to handle you.  At times wishing you dead, so that the dream of you would be only that.  When she awoke, drenched from wrestling the lover ghost of you, it might bring her to weep but at least it would no longer be the impossible waking hope.

In the light, she could remember who she was, know confidence, walk with purpose.  Not wanting anyone, including you, to know the width and depth of her affection.  When he looked at her, she saw him in equal measures.  Hiding was not possible, their souls instantly, electrically entwined with each encounter.  That smile around his lips, eyes never losing their trace.  Piercing through to the whispers of her unveiled, raw, abandoned self that no one else seemed to see.

It is not easy to dissuade the heart.  God does not care either way.

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

Near

When we were young, she always had a sixth sense when you were near.  That tingly, hair-raising, heart-beating awareness would always wrap her up with anticipation just before you would make your appearance.  Or perhaps she just had a really keen sense of smell, ferreting out any lingering scent of Export A Gold and those unfiltered pheromones you were always wafting in her direction.

She told me she still senses you.  It's still charged with the hopeful edge that someday (someday) your physical selves will collide long into the wee hours of the morning.  But it is mostly just a sense that you are in the room.  Invisible, but there non-the-less, and aware.

Driving in My Car

I paused to think of you today.  Thinking how we've committed to these roles.  Embedded and entwined in situations we're just not sure about.  And these things are always easier to get into than they are to get out.  So much damage in the extraction.  So much drama.  Plays like a bad made for t.v. movie.

Truth is, I don't really want you that much.  But I do want you some.  Or a lot.

Maybe in an illicit affair.  Like she said we'd done in other lifetimes.  (Do you suppose that is true?)  Torrid, even.  Messy, but not impossible to overcome or undo, should the others find out.   People forgive and forget these kinds of actions all the time, right?

There is something magical about the two of us, that I am at a loss to deny.  Nor want to.

Dirty

She said everything about a relationship was messy.  Real relationships anyway, not the fake kind where people never truly let the other in.  The real ones take a lot of courage.  Mostly because you let that other person see you stripped down and often in the most undignified light.

Come to think of it, life itself is often one big mess after another.  Well, that is if you are doing it right.  That's how you should see it, a little raw and rough around the edges.  As much fun as it is to get dressed up and play pretend, that's just make believe living.

Don't be afraid to get in there and get your hands dirty.  

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.

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.

Morning Coffee

She said it was the best cup of coffee she'd had since their trip to California.  She'd loved it there.  The wind in her hair from the ocean and the foggy nights filling up all of the space between them.  Dropping temperatures that made them huddle for warmth and appreciate those jeans like it was November, when in fact it was just another July in San Francisco.  The sound of trolley bells outside the hotel window and the hot taste of Thai food still on the tongue.

There is a difference you know between crying and weeping.  She said she'd learned it from personal experience.  And that if you were ever in a position to know the difference yourself, you should take it.  Weeping, she said comes from your soul.  It is like sap that flows from the roots of an ancient tree, moves through you with this fierce gentleness and makes you remember everything good that's befallen you, everything that holds you grounded.  All the people you've loved with your heart wide open.

She said she'd taken chances where others had fallen short, been afraid.  It helped, thinking this way.  Otherwise she was just a ponderous fool.

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.