She Was.

It is easy to want for longtimes. Short wants and quick wants and hard wants. It is harder, in these days when the rain fights the sun to see you want me too.

..

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury,

This is how it goes. I present to you these facts. Without favour, without prejudice. Without expectation.

I met him when I first came home. Only a couple of days. You will remember that I was not whole, present or accounted for at that time. When he took my hand and pressed it into his, somehow, just like in the movies, birds sang, the sun shone, the earth moved, bells rang, time stopped. I exaggerate, but a thought did slow down, in my head, buzzing, ‘this is why you are home, this is why it happened, him‘. I had no feeling left but the thought stayed. There was a moment across the kitchen table, our parents, moving away slowly, when I smiled. It had been precisely 26 days since the last time. We were sharing our stories, of hurt and endings and lies, and as he moved papers along the table I saw his hands shake. I thought ‘you are like me‘. He was the first stranger I told. I didn’t feel attracted to him at the time. My body had died. But I remember him tugging his t-shirt away from his body and his eyes sneaking at me, and I thought, without thinking, in another time his body will whisper to mine. That night he gave me a job and a tiny anchor back.

We slept together. Twice. And I don’t need to tell you about it, about how we drowned in it, or about holding his hand after he tried to hurt himself, I don’t need to tell you about how we protect one another, in our own ways, me with my sweated over paper and him with his eyes and his big as love hands. All this has been told and documented in other places. What I have to tell you, what I have hinted at, is that he is not single, he is  not free, he has a girlfriend. I could tell you about their relationship, his complicated circumstances, about the age difference, about her, what he has said, what she has said, but to what end? It is simple. He is not one. And I, I am. I refuse to do to her, to him, to me, what was done to me. Again. So I don’t, we don’t. But the pull, the push, the floating invisible binding strings between us. We do not talk. Occasionally we brush up against one another, in the course of the never-ending nights and it burns. When he is in trouble, when I am, each other is the  net, the safety, the question and the answer. There are no pleasantries. There is only ‘help me’ and there is only help given. He asks no questions, and he denies me nothing. He is always, unequivocally, there for me. Even when it is my fault. And this, this means that there is nothing I wouldn’t do for him, nothing he could ask that I would deny. I haven’t been writing here, because I write to him. Pages and pages of words of me, letters he will never read. I want to tell him things. My things, about my day. I am meeting a man on Thursday, a date, he is tall and blonde and blue eyed, and he sings to me, and I do not want to go because I feel like I am cheating, myself, him, everyone. I already know who I want to take me home. Somewhere in the last past time, he is all that there is left for me to want. And so I wait, and I hope, and sometimes I ignore him, and sometimes I don’t and always I know when he is in the room and always I see his composure, his stillness, falter just a little when his eyes catch mine. I tell myself that my dirty little heart can’t help but want what it wants and it wants to kiss him and hold him and soothe and laugh and cry and touch and listen and remember and fuck away his hurts (and mine). I want to make him happy. In him I feel like I could make my home, share my lasts, my truths, and finally, stop. I tell myself at the end of each nothing day that I believe in this tight that we share, it’s been too long and too constant and too deep, but the truth is that I am tired of wanting, even of the wanting itself and I do not know if we will ever be more than this longing. It is hard to want in these days when the rain fights the sun when I see him wanting me too.

I think, perhaps, it’s time to somehow, stop.

This week I have stayed standing for too many hours and too many tears have fallen. In embarrassing places. The tears started on Wednesday and they have not stopped. I feel like there is a heaviness squashing me down and into the rubber mat I stand on. I said tonight, for the first time, out loud, ‘I am just so sad’. I am just so sad. I am just so sad. I let strangers take my phone number and kiss my hand. Wet faced I smile and somehow they don’t notice. I walk past you and I feel your eyes follow me out of the dark room, they snake their way behind me up the stairs and through abandoned corridors. I know you follow me up into the blinking lights of the crow’s nest, I go there frequently now, but I cannot speak to you and you do not speak to me. You are my twin, my mirror, my sad friend. I imagine that only you know how I feel. Only you carry that heaviness with you, only you let it squash you, like it squashes me. I imagine that your smile is as empty as mine, when I see you talking and gesturing and making pleasant faces, I imagine that only you are pretending, faking, not feeling, like me. It is my imagination that keeps me wanting you, believing that we are connected you and I, by our shared grief, and our shared twisting insides, and our coffeeground spit. It is my imagination that has me seeing the safe in you, the safe in me, the light touch of together less. It is my imagination that has me loving you. Or I need to love something, someone, some time, some minute, some hour some maybe. When I imagine loving you, I feel less alone. I am being honest as I can. When your eyes follow me, I wonder if you imagine that my eyes follow you. Because they do, all of the time.  When I see you, I think that when we are together, those few hour times, it is warm, and there are many words, the right ones, and it feels like the coming together of two broken things. Like two forgotten spinning tops, out of kilter, resting propped up against each other, on the bottom shelf of an old shop window I past by once.  I didn’t imagine this.

Image found here

Yesterday the four of them, three girls and a boy, climbed to the very top of the building. One spiral staircase, a mezzanine, chandelier, four locked offices, one private residence and two more flights of stairs. Next, an old and tired ladder, narrow footholds, easy to slip, white banister, unpolished wooden steps. The awkward girl was glad that this time she had limited herself to just one drink. She needed hands to hold to get down. The boy led the way, torch in mouth. There are no lights in the old part of the building, and even if there were, sneaking up, stealing time and views, they wouldn’t have been able to make use of them. Finally a ‘mind your head’ opening, to crawl through out of and into the heavy wet air. The awkward girl, her heart was beating from the moment of the suggestion. A crow’s nest, a seeing place, a lookout – hidden here – a new view, a new way to understand. Small but an adventure. She liked the idea of seeing something secret, something the other people don’t get to see and when she stole through out of and into this new to her space she smiled. So high up she could see everything, all the horizons all the degrees. This city is so still and so flat, she thought. If she lived in this building she would drag an armchair up here, some cushions, a table, an ashtray. She would come up here and she would see and see and see, and when she got tired of looking she would sit and perhaps read, or scribble in her notebook. And up here, in her nest, high above the city, higher than high, from all degrees and every horizon she wouldn’t be taken by surprise again.

**

I saw your smile today. Of course it wasn’t yours. Too much time and distance seperate us for it to have been truly yours. Or mine. Or the one you kept for me. His face was so much like yours. I move around a lot now and I hadn’t noticed him before. As I stood still he passed me a glass and with it one of your smiles, and my face crumpled. The softening. The creases around your eyes. The warmest liquid chocolate. My eyes cried. I didn’t expect to see you. Your face, your colors, they aren’t so common here. I looked at his face and saw your stubble, the stubble that grazed every part of me. Your smile, it stole my composure, seeing that loved face. I told the girl standing next to me. I said, ‘See that man? That one over there, he has the smile of the man I loved, and when he gives it to me it makes my heart ache’. She stood quiet and spoke soft, ‘Yes’ she nodded, ‘That smile could hurt hard when trusted wrong’.

I’ve been seeing the car we drove in everywhere lately. And the first time, the first time, I looked inside, through the window real hard, to see if it was you. It won’t ever be you though. And as I realised that my eyes cried. After you smiled at me tonight, I couldn’t stop watching you, looking for more. His arms, your arms, and my fingers, lazy stroking in bed, the way your hair curls over the back of your neck when it’s a little too long. Remember how I’d kiss you there, my arms wrapped around you as you washed the dishes? When I’d watched him for awhile, I tried to find ways to earn his smile and when he did, when I won, I couldn’t breath. Later, we all sat, drinks and cigarettes in hand, talking about the night, laughing. He didn’t talk much. He listened and shook his head at all the right places, he laughed, and I wondered what he was thinking, what you were thinking all those times. Whether you were loving me or hating me, wishing me gone or holding me close. When his phone rang, his voice was soft, quiet, hard to hear, just like yours. He left before the rest of us and as he made his goodbyes, he took each of our hands in turn and held them pressed between both of his. I didn’t watch when it was my turn.

It was a whole life. I’m screaming this to you. A whole of my heart love. And I miss you. I miss you. Not every day, or every week, but sometimes, lately, I miss you ache and you are so absent from me and I wonder if you ever think of me, if you ever see parts of me, in some other girl, walking some Athenian street where I used to be and as you watch her pass do you remember me? I miss you. Or, someone very like you.