sometimes conversations dance in the shadows of the unspoken, sometimes they dance in between the shadows, trying to be had, but surrounded by things left unsaid. sometimes they come to light.

“i can’t fuck you tonight,” she said. she pulled her legs up on the couch, ostensibly to create a distance between them, but her bare feet rested on the side of his thigh, her toes softly rubbing on the fabric of his shorts. she pulled a blanket over her even though it wasn’t cold. “not tonight,” she said. “not ever again.”

he passed her the weed, hoping to loosen her defenses and went on watching television. when she finished pulling, she said she needed to get into something more comfortable. she came out wearing nothing but a t-shirt and, when she sat down again, he slid his hand under the blanket , up her legs and noted that she wasn’t wearing any underwear. “they were wet,” she said.

no, not tonight, he thought, looking at his watch—he had told his girlfriend that he was on his way and that was an hour ago. not tonight—but soon.

we talked about you the other night. we never mentioned your name. we never spoke around you. but our conversation was all about you.

we talked about fucking without having sex; and about having sex and never getting around to fucking. about condoms and fantasies and other partners and memories and what we liked in the ways you talk about what you’ll do but never have seem to have the strength to carry through when the moment comes and the sex/cock/pussy/other is in your face. on the last, i thought it was because sometimes, when the words hit the water, things splash and you change course. but i never said that because it would have caused us to see ourselves too much. we called ourselves looking, but we really weren’t.

no. we never mentioned that we stopped fucking when we lost you. because this—this was easier.

“As I figured out more of what the story was about, he started to represent not just the bad or dangerous part of magic, but also the bad or dangerous part of love. Of being emotionally vulnerable in a way that you really need to be to fall in love with someone—and the fact that the mortal people see him as reflections somehow of their first experience of love gone awry.”

—here

i miss your mind, your voice, the way you move, the way you laugh. i miss my friend.

if that is an idea, so be it.

She was hurt and dejected: “Oh, now you want to pay attention to me.” She continued putting things away—in the pantry, in the cupboards. Even things that didn’t belong there. Even things of no value. She was getting her affairs in order. Or making her life seem less unseemly.

“You haven’t learned anything,” she said, placing a half eaten lemon into a teacup, placing the teacup next to a crystal bowl of sugar. “And now you come to me as if you care.” She stopped and laughed derisively at herself. “Perhaps I can teach you now what you’ve always refused to see.”

In that instant, I saw myself no longer as a young man, but perhaps an old fool who had missed his adulthood and gone straight to the clearing at the end of his path. I saw myself in a tarnished silver teapot. I didn’t like what I saw, nor did I recognize the face. But I knew it was me.

She reached under the sink and came up with a plastic bucket. It was full of the babies we never kept, broken promises and half-finished ideas. She ran the faucet and filled the sink with saltwater tears and regret—to make it go down easier—she said. She worked from skin of a person who had been dead for a few days but not quite a week, her eyes looking for something in the middle distance, as if staring from a coffin. Her heart had been embalmed long ago.

When the mixture finished bubbling and draining she asked me if was happy. I said I wasn’t. She put her eyes on me for the first time today and it felt as if she was looking at me for the first time ever—as if she had never seen a creature so sad and so strange. She leaned into my face, ran her fingers over my nose my eyes my past. Then she kissed me…

…I woke up with her laying by my side. I was neither young man nor old fool. The weight of my mistakes were in my jaw and pulling inside my chest. She smelled of life and hope and wonder and all of the things love is made of. She rustled from her sleep and asked me if I was dreaming. “No,” I say. “I wasn’t.”

she came back holding fire in her mouth :: with blood on her lips and a bundle of dreams, wrapped in blankets, tucked under her arm :: sweet as fucking in the dew of a morning sun :: as cool and blue as the third week in May :: setting herself upon him, open :: without being open, she let him take it like it was his :: even if they both knew it wasn’t

it had been a while. again. since he’d heard her voice. and longer still since she had listened to him.

she would not leave him, but she could never be his. (she was not a girl, after all. perhaps she had once been, but he doubted it; sometimes he questioned if there was a she at all.)

he inhaled and put his pen to her breast. exhaling, he wrote the truth on her heart—in between the lines of what had happened and how it had made her feel, removed from how it made her feel than and how it makes her feel now—and hoped it would be enough.

(it never was, but that never stopped him.)

(because she lacks new words for old feelings, she calls the men she wants to love her “daddy.”)

she can hardly remember that the only junk food she allowed herself to eat where the snack-sized treats that he brought home from the breakroom at his job. and she can’t make the connection between the moment he walked away and left her dazed and semi-sconscious in a broken puddle of her own consolation and the economy-sized backs of chocolate bars she’s been buying to the tune of fifty additional pounds. what she does recall is this: how they made her feel like a kid and a child all at once—in the best and the worst ways: protected, cared for, reminded to have fun, controlled, dependent, patronized. it’s funny how well-intentions can do that.

even all this time later, it still hits her—if “hit” can be used for something as faint as what was once a series of waves, tidal and surging and breaking at her heart and bones. they’re now less than mist, whispers of smoke that she can barely feel. though she has thousands of encrpyted megabytes  in myDairy entires revolving around him—to him, for him, about him, a running catalog of things she wishes she could share with him—she can no longer muster up any emotion behind them; it’s heartbreak on automatic, longing by script. missing him has become her habit, her victimization and abandonment an unseen and unshiftable paradigm.

she’s scared of losing that much of herself again.

we were a fine entertainment. like snow mixed in with rain, our stars were crossed from the outset. all we had on our side was our pointless inconsistencies and luck—stupidity and that child of chance and superstition. the fates were against us and the gods laughed nervously at our folly. until we beat them all.

we slew all dragons. and, yet, it was the minds of mortals and the tongues of men that brought us to ruin.

(you would change your colors like the leaves in fall/ i was saving up for the long winter/ summers we’d hide out in my car/ when it broke down we didn’t care…)

his arms, wrapped around her, reminded him of how much he missed her. she was fragile, in the way that she could only be when she was sorry. he squoze her tightly—she felt small, as if she’d lost her weight in tears—and it was as if he’d break her, but he took the risk anyway, pressing her deeper into him. she struggled to breathe, but didn’t mind. every breath smelled of him.

later—after the sizing up, the small talk, the rememberings and the orgasms—they made something to eat.

“you’re never truly beautiful unless you’re vulnerable,” he said. she could tell he had been carrying the idea around for a while; she waited for him to unpack the rest of it, but he never did. he just kept breaking off the ends of the asparagus spears, one by one, while she stirred her saucepot. he blinked his eyes, holding something back behind them, along with his need to be right. he knew what he wanted to say, but the new words he was making up still lacked acceptance and understanding.

when she couldn’t take it anymore—the biting of her lip, holding back feelings—her need to be heard and acknowledged, the necessity of having something to contribute to the world conversation won and she said: “sexiness is borne of freedom.”  she continued swirling her saucepot, enchanting herself. in her mind she tasted a new word that had never been spoken.

“the weird thing about freedom,” he said, “is that it’s given to us by birth, freely, yet it means nothing if we don’t clasp it and hold on to it and defend it.”

that was what she meant; and to her, it was what she said. she kept stirring. the new word was gone, now mixed with the old. the sauce was red and began to smell like the echoes of old words shouted across people who weren’t listening. she removed it from the fire, but it was too late.

“first loves are overrated,” he said. ”your first love isn’t as important as your last love.”

she didn’t know how that connected with what she had said; the words from her pot had taken her back to another time. perhaps it had always been like this—perhaps the echoes were the past, not the future. as she wondered if she had missed moments, he took the broken ends of the asparagus and tossed them in the garbage. the bag was clean, with nothing in there but last bits of dust and the seal of the ’82 wine bottle she had opened for her sauce. she had obviously cleaned up before he got there, he thought. when she heard his thought, she couldn’t taste the expression behind it—it was so faint and she could never quite distinguish embarrassed appreciation from unearned pride.

she wondered how long it would take the bag to get full. she wondered if she would take it out before then. or if she would ask him to take it out in the morning. maybe she would take it out herself.

her sauce grew cold, thick and loud with the old words. he sprinkled the asparagus and turned on the oven. they would make love again before the preheat cycle, and two more times before they ate.

in the middle of the night, when she awoke with him growing inside of her, she spread and opened and took him in. but she still heard the whispers of the sauce and wondered about the trash.

you first sayin’ you love me Thursday thru Sunday

Monday, your words changed to “fuck me”

my therapy is Earl Gray and honey—

sip slow, readin’ poetry from Rumi