Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Detachments

In all of the storms here I come to thinking about Stephanie. Sometimes I forget about her and suddenly remembering the way she smiled when I left her sends shivers down my spine. It's been months since I last heard her voice through the wires, she was in Venice then, we had spent a drunken week together in the canals and the alleys and she called me just to say hello.

I always feel as if I owe her something, a bigger piece of my heart or another way of listening. It's a guilt that could tare me apart in the past but more and more I'm learning to ignore it. The indifference frightens me, the way I'm completely numb sometimes, and all that calms me down now is the sporadic vivid memory of something I used to feel. It so often starts with a dream.




Monday, July 15, 2013

Hold my hand and tell me you love me

No one knows what he said to me, Henry, just before he left. Chloe has other things on her mind, I can tell from the careful way she steps out of her shoes when she comes back from work. The sound of it speaks more clearly than anything she could ever put into words, her naked footsteps on the black marble in the hallway is what authors spend lifetimes trying to write about.

We haven't smoked together on the balcony since April, the memory of it seems like from another life. I'm afraid we might be growing apart, she doesn't talk to me the way she used to. It has happened before but this time it's different, more acute. I hide in my room when she walks by, hoping she will pause and lean against the door but she never does.

A year ago we were a wasteland apart, now the distance between us seems bigger than ever.

 


Wednesday, July 10, 2013

A night in the skin

There's a certain density in the air now, encapsulated in the raindrops, it keeps me falling in and out of sleep until the morning. I dream intensely and wake up in the dark, the heart in a violent uproar, all I can wear is thin layers of lace and his intrusive absence.

This morning on his side of the bed, something about a dream I had forcing me to reach for the letter I wrote to him, the one in the night stand drawer. My fingertips brushing against a soft piece of fabric and the warmth of the air turns to ice in a fraction of a heartbeat.

On top of the letter, neatly folded and smelling vaguely of his cologne: the black Givenchy cardigan I got him for his birthday. Hours later I still can't escape the image of him placing it there, of him finding the letter, reading it and putting it back before I could see him, and of him saying "I love you" just before he left, not letting me know if he had read it or not.




Saturday, July 6, 2013

Exodus

I can't stand the indolently happy, the sound of their shallow blathering is excruciating torture like needles through the skin, a Shakira song on a crowded dance floor. Every fourth of July I'm reminded, how they would swarm around me like insects awaiting the fireworks, celebrating a fraudulent freedom.

Mother would always be too busy watching her hair in the late night breeze but my father would see it just like I did. We would so often share the exact same thought and I told him because I needed him to know. "If you die" I said, "I will too". "Don't ever think that" he replied with a muted voice, looking wistfully into the distance and the dark.

A year later on the fourth of July I was alone with them, the swarming insects, the indolently happy and their platitudes, wishing for a storm to wash it all away.



Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Must be the clouds in my eyes

He didn't look back as he walked through the gate, Henry. Not that I expected him to when I pictured the scene in my head but the way it turned out I almost imagined he would. The last hours spent together and the things we said, the things we didn't say and his Dior cologne, it's all infused in my summer clothes and the skin underneath.

I still can't shake the feeling: us holding hands in a convenience store on 8th Avenue (me holding his more than anything), minutes away from the green mile cab ride through Lincoln tunnel all the way to Newark. He pays for the water, jokes around with the clerk and holds the door for me, the perfect gentleman with that perfect effortlessness.

As I pass him he leans into me, buries his face in my hair and whispers through the noise and the traffic: "I love you so much". All the rest is silence and an impermeable darkness before my eyes, like breathing under water or trying to wake up from a bad dream. I don't remember speaking to him before we part at the airport and he's walking away from me, it's the first of July and he doesn't look back.





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