I’d been waking in the grey of dawn again. The magic hour when anything is possible and you could still be there beside me. I savored it, until it went sour. Your warmth, your mouth, your breath, the silhouette of your head above me. I touched a face no longer there, it hadn’t been for months. I don’t understand why those mornings ever came to me, how you ever rested on the pillow beside me, if it weren’t to stay. I have no right to speak, no right to miss you, no right to conjur you in the gloaming hours.
I was completely unprepared to be near you Friday. I didn’t think about having to sit near you, to say hello, give you a hug in greeting. I’d been thinking about you, not about the mornings or the nights, but the quiet. The stillness. The peace and openness that came over me when I was with you. Like you sitting on the floor, leaning against me on the couch. One touch of your head to mine; a moment of grace and finally a moment of us.
I know you’d rather put it away, I know talking about it “wouldn’t be fair” to her. I am supposed to accept that what was created between us was so exceptional and so extraordinary that we’re never acknowledging it again. I am supposed to turn away from someone who once said they’d “tear down the world” to have me. Do you understand why I can’t sing for you? I tried to throw it away once, and it made you angry, but you’ve effectively put it away and closed the book. How is that fair to me? As if it was ever fair, to any of us.
Why did it happen then? I’ve always believed in fate and serendipity. I cannot accept that we happened for no reason at all, that this is something I’m supposed to ignore. People wait a lifetime to have a taste of what we shared, and I believe some never see it. I don’t think ignoring it is the answer.
Nor do I welcome the dissection of how different we are, it’s easy to try and prove to myself why we never would work. But people sustain each other in so many myriad ways, sometimes it’s easy to overlook the obvious. No relationship is the same as one before: a smith can never hew the same sword twice. We have such obvious differences, I’m more concerned with the needs we did fill in each other; it felt like my songwriter. It felt like your poet, your writer, your fantasist, your pirate and hero, your imagination, the lover standing tall in the dark in the rain on the beach in a storm, clandestine and tenderest soul. It was a world where peaches whispered and whales danced. How often does that happen? And I suppose I have to ask how long does it last?
Did I honestly see it playing out any differently? I wasn’t expecting it to end. I believe in fluidity. That people meant for each other will seek eachother out despite circumstance, will continue to explore those parts of them fed by the other. Will not shut doors without certainty. I’m naive. But I was willing to accept a different finale, willing to believe that it was true.
I used to sit in the sugar barn in spring, keeping the fire and cats company. Outside was nearly freezing, raw thaw, but inside steam rose off the sap vats and filled the air with a syrup smell. Sun shone through the slats and gave substance to the curtains of steam.