you're right

You’re right, we’ve never had a deep, philosophical conversation.

So what? What sort of deep, philosophical conversations do you need?

My ex just wanted me to shut up, stop asking so many damn questions, stop being curious. Just be a quiet nine-to-fiver, pay the bills, don’t take too long to come. And please, for the love of the god I’ll never believe in, be efficient in this life, dear girl. Don’t entertain those ambitions or dreams of yours.  Oh no.

Just make it safe. Do it all on time. And please, for me, baby, keep it dull.

But not me. I’d rather sharpen that knife. Over and over.

This blade is ready for slicing. Not for inflicting any pain, just for accuracy while I cut through all the bullshit.

And what good are these conversations anyway? What do you want to know about me that you can’t perceive right here, right now?

Yes, sometimes, I think it’s really that basic.  After all these years of trying to love people, of them trying to love me, after all is said and done, we only see what we want to see. You see what you want to see. And I can tell you for a fact that one, or even two or ten or twenty, so-called deep, philosophical conversation is not going to illuminate my entire soul. Or yours, either.

Why me? You could have any guy. Why me?

That’s an annoying question.

Why not you?

Kissing you reminds me of high school.  Me and a boy on a couch in my parents’ dark living room, the old Sony Trinitron flickering images on the wall behind us. It’s late and I know, any minute now, my stepdad is going to come down the stairs---stealth quiet as if he’s hoping he’ll catch us--- and tell the boy it’s time to go.

It’s like waiting for the creak in the step on the stair. That one sound will break the spell.

But until then, it’s nothing but the silvery hue of the television on our faces, and the smell of Downy fabric softener, and the itchy feel of his wool sweater.

With you it’s just your tan arms and muscles, your urgent hands that pull me close, and own me, take me over. I've always wanted someone to pull my hair and shove me up against the wall and hold me there with his lips and chest alone. No one does that.

Hold my arms down. Tell me how it’s going to be. Push me into the wall.

You do that. Almost.

I know you could do that completely if I knew you better. Oh, that’s right, if only we had deep, philosophical conversations. 

You take over in your way. I get lost in it. It’s good.

The thing is, I want to get lost in all the things you make me want. What more is there to say?

after you

After you, I decided I’d never date a writer again. 

No one who would hug, yes really, literally, hug the giant trees all around campus, oblivious to the people around him. Never again would I date a writer, someone who would grow wheatgrass in his dorm room, in tiny, smelly containers, and shout, fearless and humiliating across the quad I love you Jessica while I was walking with somebody else, someone who had just taken me to dinner.

Your brilliance was captivating, to be sure. But your insanity, even more so.

I still have all your letters, your poems, that soliloquy you wrote for me about Orleans, the summer we spent, that magical one, the kind that lives on in your mind, contained, like a locked wooden box, because it’s a place you can go to remember what innocence was like. Once in a while, every few years or so, I read them. They are sad. You made me out to be something I never was.

I was never a person. I was just another poem in your mind.

You once locked me in a room when I was seventeen and you were twenty. And you said, nothing but bathroom and water breaks, because you were going to teach me.

If you can get there yourself, you can get there with me, you said.

At the end of the long afternoon, I cried from frustration, partly at you, partly at myself.

I just can’t.

Yes you can.

No I can’t.

We were sweaty with the sun sinking into the horizon, so sweaty and your mom was going to be home soon. We’d hear her car, wouldn’t we?

I was your prisoner. But I didn’t want you to let me go.

I needed to let me go. But when I let go, you held on. And on. You made me afraid. You were writing me. All the time.

When we were together, I was just words forming poems, and you saw past me. You saw past everyone. Everything was a poem for you.

I was in your wedding. Years later. A bridesmaid. I loved your wife, too. It was strange for everyone but us. I’ll never forget late at night in the wedding tent, hours later, after we all took too many pictures, pictures I never got to see. It was such a beautiful wedding, so dramatic in the endlessness of the Catholic church, echoic and haunting, foreboding even, and the reception at your parents house, the backdrop of the Berkshires in the distance, the shimmering water, and your new wife. No one was ever more beautiful. You had everything.

But everything was only words.

Where did your words go?