Day 4

It starts in darkness.  I want to steal a few more minutes from the day. Replay all the beautiful things that are mine, ours, yours. I can’t.  The parts of you that belong to me and not anyone else. Or the parts of me that belong to you. It is the same. There is not much, and it doesn’t matter anyway because there is a dog whining, pawing at my bedside, his fluffy ears pricked in anticipation. There is a large pile of laundry, some of it clean, some of it dirty, all too exhausting to address, but placed in front of the other more unpleasant tasks that lie ahead.  I don’t do any of them. I am entranced by the music. My accumulated history. I walk through the house, picking up stray pieces of paper, organizing piles of books, rearranging my overflowing spice racks. I want to tell you my entire life story, as if there were meaning in the words, as if in the telling there would be some release, some peace, some… something other than this devouring loneliness that splashes back up against the malecón of my outer limits, crashing around me and seeping in. When you invited me in to your universe, you apologized. You seemed to intuit that your love would tumble all my walls and crack my foundations. I’m floating in suspense, waiting to know if there is any way to rebuild myself stone by stone, filling in the gaps with freshly mixed cement, gentle words, ineffable emotions transmitted through touches, kisses, eyes that look up and search for me, and blink in recognition. I lay in bed, in darkness, trying hard to hold fast to those beautiful things, because the fear chases me, nips at my ankles, arms, breasts, with canine teeth and razor-sharp ferocity. She is pretty, I think. Tall, and blonde and thin and stylish and put together. She is sweet. Everything that I am not, that I could never be. And I accept her bony, beautiful handshake and I tell her my name, and she tells me hers, though I already know it. And she blinks like a doe in headlights, but does not know anything about anything about anything. Why? How? And I continue talking, burrowing in farther to the conversation with your friend, whose stories I know, but who knows nothing of me. He reaches out and touches my arm. I hold on to that lifeline, hold on for dear life. Let him wrap me up in his warmth, his extra clothing. In his approximation of you, to you. A safe simulacrum. A shield. I can’t look at her or talk to her, I can’t like her, I can’t know her, and so, I pretend that there is no one else but the two of us, and he plays along. Willing? Knowing? My guess is as good as yours. The danger passes, and she moves on, uninterested and unperturbed. And I know now that I am lost at sea, with no moorings, and the day flows by, and I am still in darkness, in bed, fighting the list of tasks that grows and grows.