Temporary
I knew you were temporary. I knew our love was tethered to the summer wind, bound to be lost to the ocean and an ever growing number of days, years. With each kiss, I counted the minutes left, trying to grasp on to the last moments of your subtle accent, the last seconds of your smile.
I begged myself not to love you. Tried to will the veins of my heart to resist the very feeling they had been built for. I knew it would only make the inevitable harder. What if it didn’t have to be temporary? But I was too afraid to tell you I would relocate my future just to be able to run my fingers through your hair again.
I wrote down every conversation. Every moment. I wrote how your glasses rested on the curve of your nose, how your hand danced on my neck when we kissed, how you kept two earrings pinned to the inside of your hat, for just in case. I didn't want to miss any detail. I didn't want to forget anything. As if maybe, when our souls had drifted an ocean apart, I could still have you, if only in my memory.
I would never tell you that I loved you–that I still loved you.
As summer subsided to snow, I spent my nights fighting off the memory of your warm breath on my neck, begging my brain to come up with anything, anything else to fall asleep to. Some nights I would indulge my delusion, let myself draft how we would meet again in some future I wanted desperately to believe in. On the worst nights, when the silence of suburbia gave my thoughts the microphone I tried so hard to silence, I would replay the three seconds you'd sent me once upon what now seemed like a dream. "Ehm, goodnight, sleep tight," it would sing through my phone speaker.
Your eyes faded from my memory and I tried to let myself lose you. I tried to relinquish the fantasies of some far off day when you would gently tuck my curls behind my ears again, wish me goodnight in your accented English. I tried my hardest to stop looking for you in every brunette I saw on the streets. I tried, oh God I tried, to admit that it was only temporary.
--
It was a warm April evening when I saw you again. It is over, I wrote on a napkin as I prepared myself with a cappuccino. It is over, I repeated as I snaked through the foreign streets to your apartment. It is over, I tried to will my heart to, finally, close.
But standing there, in an open flannel, I couldn't help but hope for some fantastical forever.
And like the dream I had drafted so many times, your heart was still open, too.
The ocean cannot take you away from me.
Whirlwind...
As we slip
into grace
the forgotten
place
with your face
so dear
so warm
and near
we listen...
Outside
the wind
is stirring.
While here
in this night
of each other's
light
we receive
the blessing
of love
caressing
while outside
the wind
She whispers :
Now fate
it seems
will mend
your dreams
from broken darkness
to boundless moonbeams.
The most useless piece of paper
I suppose its a nice wall hanging. Not the most beautiful of decorations, although maybe it would be more interesting if I could read latin. Certainly not worth the many thousands of dollars I payed for it, but there it hangs.
Of course, I could have hung a nice watercolor of flowers in the office instead, or a portrait of my family, a photograph of a mountain I'd visited many years ago. Instead, there hangs the latin block letters, my neatly printed in the middle.
I remember just a few years back, a late winter night in the library, thinking this piece of cardstock would change everything. The most important document I would ever get my hands on. But there it sits. Worthless. Useless. Possibly the most useless piece of paper I have ever owned. My liberal arts degree.
