You. I have so many stories for you, dear. The story about how I laid there all night, my hip falling off of the tiny little bed that we slept in, my naked body in contact with yours no matter which way we turned. How I watched your breath as you slept. Or the window. Sometimes I watched the window, cold and illuminated by city lights. All the while contemplating what you were and what I had conceived you to be. My mind racing with the idea of how I'd ruined my memory: my first notion was that I'd just lost that memory by coming to see you, but then I knew better.
I came to understand I'd destroyed it.
You were not what I'd dreamed you were, glanced at in only a window of time too brief to put together anything more than a dream. But still I found your name at my lips. I wonder if as we grow older we become more and more capable of clinging to ideas, and using them to take us away from our lives. In younger days I thought forever-love was only a myth. This is not love. But this will last me a good long time, until love comes around. And maybe it will help me to keep my faith in men.
Your touch.
Memories of you. We'd only had one. Memories of you as this bastion of all I had wanted, but could not have.
And now I find myself happy to be here alone, without you or anyone else. I am surprised to find my memory still intact. It was neither lost nor ruined. All the ways that I knew you would prove unlivable if only you were given the chance to live, gave way to the lovely things one can believe when one doesn't need to know all the dirty truths that come with time. You are not that ugly. Not in this view.
Maybe in your mind neither am I. You remembered strange details that (if you'd looked on this all quite as flippantly as I might have imagined in sadder states of mind) you never would have. Maybe you've dwelled on our encounter as long as I have.
I have so many stories for you, dear. I could tell them to you, but I daresay you don't want to hear.
I could tell you stories about my day. I could tell about my life in paint and antonyms, and the grand expanse of my life before me that scares me and boils me right down to a shivering mass of indecision, paralyzed behind a computer. I could tell you sweet couple-things, and whisper right into your ear `How I love you!' at the end of the day when we lie there in that tiny little bed, cursing off morning by giggling into the veil of being young and being naked and near.
But all of this would amount to telling you who I really am, and I'm not ready to give that away quite yet. I'll remain an idea, and so shall you to me, the stories left behind in the distance. After all, all of that is what I don't want to know about you, so I'm willing to believe that `all of that' is just what you don't want to know about me. Let it be.
Oh but the stories!!! The stories I could tell you, if you only were here to hear.
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