cmsiena
I imagine you sitting in the study, leather chair and mahogany shelving. You're staring out the window behind the desk, into the woods, hands folded. Pensive. Unwinding all your dreams from where they lay curled up in the corners of this large, empty house. Lost in the silence, the space, the gaps where love should be.
Somewhere in all this, my brain and my heart have become an integrated thing, a monster with scaly hands and reaching arms, calculating the fastest way to catch its prey and drink the blood. I am older and wiser and put together, and that is when I transformed into someone lost.
So I am usually able to so gracefully cover up these alarming scars and hurts with my own chainlink fence, my own barbed wire and sharpened tongue. Quick to strike and dart away, like the hornet. Then I hedgehog sleep, curled around in my own insecurities, reluctant to break that hold. But when I wake, my heart is shredded and flaps like rags in the wind, and I know my dreams have betrayed me.
So I delve into the box, picking up fragments of all the lives that could have been. A card with a heart-turned-mouse sketch, a patch of a flannel red blanket, the broken frame of a pair of dark black glasses, a wine cork, a number on a receipt, and the string off a sweatshirt five sizes too big that I still borrowed. At the bottom, a pair of sunglasses and an unopened envelope.
I love that you are human, with your beautiful veins and twitches and sighs. That we share the same airstream, that the ins and outs of your flaws fit like jigsaw pieces against mine. I love the way this is effortless, and even my exasperations vanish in the wake of your wholeness.
These are the days when sunlight hits everything and bathes it in blue and green and yellow, and the daffodils bob. The boys are shouting and the girls are laughing. Hands are held on screened in porches, on hanging swings, on patios by grills as the burgers sizzle. The sunglasses come out to shade the windows to the soul and it is summer, so to do anything but love is taboo.
I am so lost in my heartache that I forget I am standing at the sink, wringing my hands full of soap over and over while the water runs. Gritting my teeth, I stare at my eyes. Deep down into the dark narrow pupils, I still see the glimmer of your reflection. Other women come and go without a word. They know this need to wash every hint of unfaithful touch from the skin, and so they let me be.
It is like the dawn in my heart, where the shadows still clasp in long reaches across a brambly stretch of wilderness. The sun is climbing slowly, a smile that warms all the dark places I tried so very hard to protect. All that sinew is filleted, thin and flaking. Falling apart at your touch, melting under your eyes.
I stood next to the planter, waiting for you to come to the door. My sunglasses are pink, they glisten and hide the way my eyes dart back in forth. I do not smile, I do not sigh, I simply stand like a statue. For each moment I wait, my doubt grows, creeping like vines up my legs and waist, clinching my arms to my side. I am always afraid you will not answer.
And there we stand, am I in checkmate? Where you are silent and I am stone, and just our hearts beat in time. Perhaps this feeling is not solely the right angles of these monochrome checkerboard squares, maybe there is a muddy ruddy gray that just blends all this confusion together. For we could stand, just lips apart, and I could wish you to read this love in my eyes, but you and I both know that there is more between us than just the breath of wind that howls and swirls. I read the signs day after day with nothing but a solitary sigh. No, not checkmate, stalemate, as we wait for a hand to move us together or break us apart.
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