"I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles
better and nerves more." – ee cummings
****************
The skin on the inside of his wrists is softer than the Mongolian cashmere baby
blanket you bought your son (still gift wrapped and on a high shelf in your
storage closet). The chip in his bottom front tooth has cut your tongue more
than once. His muscles jump and tense when you touch him like you want it to
mean more. There is a light in his eye that does something to your insides that
you can’t put into words. His sleepy voice carrying over a phone line, across
the miles, sounds like salvation even after all these years.
He sighs into the phone and you shift as your stomach jumps. You hold your breath,
he speaks softly to you. You whisper his name and he whispers yours back. Two
simple syllables float through the air and speak to you like a secret that no
one else knows. He says all the right things and when the release comes it’s
slow and satisfying. The ways that he knows you no one else does…or ever will.
In moments it terrifies you, in others it satisfies you. This living, breathing
proof of the one thing you’ve done well – earn his love.
He says it was good and you nod but don’t reply. He starts to say goodbye but
you hush him quickly. He breathes heavy for a while longer, saying nothing more.
He finally whispers that he is sleepy. You ask him to stay on the phone and
he does. You pull the sheet up and turn the light out and listen to the night
take him. When he starts to softly snore, you close your eyes. If you concentrate
long enough and hard enough you can smell him there beside you: dryer sheets
and mint and oil paints and cigarettes.
You wonder if you’re fated to a life of late night phone calls, waking in the
night to the heated metal of an overused phone burning the skin on your ear.
Your life is here and his life is there and it’s not that the roads run parallel
but they don’t seem to intersect. At least not from where you stand. Sometimes
you miss what you had; sometimes you wish things were different. But you still
have him. And maybe one day it will be more, but even if it never is…you’ll
take it. Because he is right here, with you right now, in all the ways that
count.
End
Feedback to throughthelens78@yahoo.com