In your silence

From the pages of inattentive reading in new places, she rises to look at me over your shoulder. This night, I cannot stop thinking about her and you.

Did her hands play idle games with your waist and her lips with your ear on the ride there? Did you check into a hotel with her the way you have with me? Was your smile as intimate? Did you meander through the same motions of unpacking and undressing, of sharing those secret, shy glances as you shut out life out at last?

As you lay down on that unfamiliar mattress, did you draw her to you the way you reach for me? Would she have sighed like me, when your fingers went wandering on their way to her breasts and in between her legs? I wonder if she lay on her side while your breathing slowed and you played with her back.

I lose my way into letters you wrote when you were first aware of me. Letters you wrote when I wavered and you did not. Letters you wrote in those nights of persuasion and reassurance. Cruelly, your words draw me down sepia streets, not long abandoned. Streets where prospective lovers unendingly dance the tango. The same streets where you and I first raised our arms to begin an awkward interpretation of love.

Do you remember how you first whispered to me… frantic… tender… when I was mad and gorgeous and admirable… when I came to you, holding broken illusions of nothing in my hands?

That which you once loved tires you now. I scratch and replace and scratch these mediocre words furiously. Reams of paper and images wash into insipid renderings of the vastness in your eyes.

Tonight, I finally understand. She is a part of my silence and your impatience. She was a time of impassioned phrases melting in dark grottoes of desire. She is our past... your hands whispered to her body in streams of unrest and black. In these streams, I will meet your silence.