Spatially

If you were a page in a book, I'd be stuck there for the rest of my life. Lost in print. Wandering in your inked muteness. A piece of memory trying to fit itself in the grand scheme of things. Silence is your language, but my fingertips will sense you like a flurry of words gracing the paper. Like tattoo. As permanent as the sun.

You are a very strange page. For something so thin it carries the only story I will ever need. Words are heavy, people say. I can just imagine the real weight of a novel. But like the page that you are, I wonder how long you will be able to hold yourself together. Or apart. Sometimes I just want to tear you off, fold you, and keep you deep in my pocket so that wherever I go I will have you and you will have me. Even in sleep. Especially in sleep.

But you are neither a page nor a book. You are a woman. You are a woman and for the last several years I still can't read you even if you are the braille to my blindness.

Maybe I just want to nibble your earlobes. Yours look too beautiful sometimes I wonder if they contain your soul. I think it wouldn't hurt one bit if I kiss them and say My preciousssss...

I confess: I'm not good with excuses. I can imagine the day we'll meet again. You. Me. Walking. And in my vain attempt to parry the trembling in my knees I'll let go of your hand and point to the sky and say Wow look at that! and you will look up and I will look at you and I will tell you as fast as I can I will tell you I really will and it is this I missed you the way an amputee has been missing his left leg for so long and you'll say Sorry what was that again? and I'll smile and say Nothing, it was nothing. And I'll hold your hand again.

I'll confuse you --- no, I'll discombobulate you --- because I love the way the tip of your eyebrows almost sink just below the top of your nose bridge. They remind me of a song about a bridge in London about to fall down. Or just fall. No one falls up. I'm sure I didn't the day I fell.

To that, I can imagine you saying Segue. And I'll smile and say Smooth as an alibi.

I know the amputee metaphor doesn't sound right, but to my ears they're music, Bach and Beethoven rolled into one like sushi and neither one is complaining even if they understand fully well that they did not spend their lives mastering their music just to end up on somebody's dinner plate on a random evening. Comedy is tragic. I have a tendency to be mushy because in my life I've said too many lines with so much cheese in them I'd probably be able to feed all the hungry people in the world. Just by talking.

So let me talk to you and I swear from this day onward your heart will never be hungry again. I'll feed myself to it.