I wish you were here in my empty bed so it would not be so hollow. It’s been filled with clothing to mimic the twisting forms of company, but last I checked, sweaters don’t talk. They don’t try to keep me. I wrote once that my sheets felt like sand, that if I were to turn over in the middle of the night, absence would hit me like a blinding storm. They’re doing it again, right now, with this soft music playing that reminds me so much of your hands tracing my cheekbones when my glasses are off.
You are small beautiful simple things, like a line perfectly written, the only one in the novel that you’ll bother to remember later, but when you’re away is all the time. It reminds me of the time I missed someone to death. When it happened, my pillows and blankets quivered, shuddered, and stopped breathing. My heart was dazed, dropped from a great height, and I have yet to recover its wings from the wretched broken mess of glass shattered connection.
The shape of you fills with mistakes when you are not around to fill in. The secondary characteristic of your absence is my dwelling on how much I can’t deal with it. When I’m missing you, your smile bleeds out of my mind, to be replaced by how often I sleep alone and never with you. You right now are someone else. A heavenly creature I don’t know, who sacrifices something that looks like my integrity to an altar I’m not allowed to approach or respect.
Then it slips out, my joan of arc moment, seeping through the cracks in all my routine and argument. It’s the pattern. You cut here and put these seams together. You prick your finger on the pins that have somehow found themselves between your lips. My fear is a foot on the pedal, the sway and yank of social fabric. I’m uncertain. I can’t wear this dress, it’s heavy and the embroidery’s just tacky. Not already, not so soon, but then your voice is crashing into me. I’ve been tackled by a thousand foot wave of feeling like myself again. You push me up to the firmament.
Tonight I thought I saw you standing on the corner of that memory, just enough out of vision that I could place you where I wanted to. It was a conversation about skin, about nerve endings. The technology that craves contact. Our first hint of compatible loneliness.