Fragments of Fiction

The tall brunette tries not to let me see her eyes walk up and down me as she hasn’t decided whether to let the walls drop or build them higher.

She tells me I am shorter than she remembers and then waits for me to say it doesn’t matter if we’re lying down.

I remain silent as I am not bothered by any of this, not because I am still taller than her but because silence is my best tool.

She knows I can carry a conversation by myself if I feel like it and also knows I am capable of being stone silent for days.

We’re both posturing and dancing in a circle around the other, anxious to tear down the walls but concerned about the outcome if we do.

Funny to think how quickly we can fall in and out of routines.

When she turns away I take full advantage of not being seen and let my eyes stroll up and down.

Better Together Or Apart

During the moments of separation there are internal discussions about whether we are better together or apart.

Conversations in which we work to convince ourselves that together isn’t a good idea because it has hurdles and challenges that fantasy is best left as fiction.

Those work until the moments in which life intersects and conversation with eye contact resumes. There is a level of comfort and ease that is so deep we don’t notice it, but others do.

They remark upon it and ask how such a thing is and we laugh.

In the embrace of the midnight hours I think about that level of comfort and how rare it is, recognizing this is what it is when we are partially guarded, imagine what it is like when we let the walls down.

You could stick us in a closet or on an island and come back in a month and we would be ok because we like and maybe even still lust each other.

It is the lust part that keeps things interesting.

She tries not to discuss or acknowledge it, we suspect because it is like Pandora’s box.

It is a nice idea, except the box was opened long ago. We know what touch can do, especially when you don’t have to think about it.

Natural connection works.

We might too.

The boy wrote 10,000 letters and the girl read almost all of them.

Sometimes she told him what she thought and sometimes he had to guess.

Sometimes he saw her and caught a look in her eyes that made it clear he could still see what lay beneath the surface.

He always remembered that whatever he could see inside her she could see inside him.

One day he wrote her a letter and said he knew she still loved him and that, of course, he still loved her because the kind of love they had never could die.

It might go through periods of time in which it slumbered a bit and there would be moments where it felt like maybe slumber was too generous a word. Moments where he was sure she wondered about it as he did, but then something would happen.

Always, something would happen and he would remember.

He assumed she remembered too and that she intentionally remained silent.

Perhaps it was because she couldn’t see a way forward or perhaps it was because she would protect her own heart by not allowing entry.

He always figured she avoided spending real time with him for that reason because distance made it easier to maintain the wall and the fiction.

Of course he thought there was always the chance he was wrong, but the actions showed otherwise, at least some of them did.

A long twisty road lay behind and perhaps in front.

Sometimes he thought about just pulling her into his arms and kissing her but he didn’t.

Once she would have melted into him and perhaps she still wanted to or would again, but she wasn’t the only one to protect their heart.

He told me the thing he remembered the most wasn’t the silver bracelets that kept his arms behind his back or the smell of a car interior in desperate need of an odor neutralizer.

Nor was it the chatter of the radio or cackling of the people who saw him get his silver bracelets.

It was a hand.

“The hand on the back of your head stays with you. That rough push down that they do to keep you from banging it on the door frame is the clearest sign that you are not seen as a human.

It is a rough shove like they would give livestock they are guiding into the barn, which I guess is kind what happens.

Because they lead you to a barn or maybe a pen is a better word and lock you in.”