The room did not have to remember what it could finally hold. A collaboration with EC (@erroneouschoices)

The kitchen did not feel haunted this morning.  That was the first thing I noticed.  The room had no work to do, no old song to hold in the walls, no whisper of regret moving through the corners.  She was there, within touching distance, sitting at the table with her legs tucked under her.  Her fingers moved slowly along the coffee mug, and she wore a smile that said more than it revealed. She sat as if she knew where the light would find her. The small lamp over the range laid gold across her face as the morning gathered in the window, and for once memory had nothing to prove. The room did not have to remember her. It could simply hold her. 

I’m a blade, but I’m also an angel and I’ve always known about depth and sarcasm. He was the one that saw every part of me and surprisingly enough, he stayed. He never knew that his thoughts were revealed with each tap of his spoon on the pan or in the way he said my name. And I didn’t tease him about it, I just pretended that each verbal revelation was new to my ears and that I wanted to be love-soaked by him. Morning was so clever, as the nighttime thigh-kiss memories drifted through my mind, the day’s instruction felt so simple. Attached to a belief that I will only be able to feel what’s real. 

I knew she was watching me, though her eyes stayed mostly on the mug. That was one of the mysterious things about her. She did not need to look directly to see me. I moved around the kitchen with more care than the task required, rinsing the spoon, setting the pan in the sink, finding small duties for my hands because stillness beside her felt too revealing. She was close enough that I could have touched her shoulder without leaning. Close enough to hear the small changes in her breath. Close enough for my body to mistake nearness for understanding. Close enough that my hands remembered her skin before I gave them permission. But there are distances no hand can cross. I knew that even then. Maybe especially then. She was at my table, under my light, inside the little circle of warmth the room had made for us, and still there was some distant land moving behind her eyes.

So many stories are told by soft falling rain that sometimes I think he and I have lived in a gentle storm since the day we met. He’s woken up perfect again today but he doesn’t know it. I don’t mention it because he’d just tell me all of the reasons he couldn’t be. So instead I hold my secret in the palm of my hand and save it. I wait for the next time he’s buried between my thighs and he finds it in the whisper of his name. There is a little mark on his lower lip that I stare at when he tells me things about life and the moon and his thoughts about tomorrows. He has told me he believes that God created light so that we could look at each other and even though we don’t believe in god, it still rings true. I know It’s impossible to tell him all of the ways I feel about him because the words for those haven’t been created yet. So instead we wait for the next syntax to break open so we can swallow it whole.

She looked at me in a way that made my shoulders drop and my blood move at the same time. I do not know a word for that. Desire is too small. Love is too clean. Want is too hungry. This was older than any of them, something the body understood before language came along and started pretending it could name such things. It was the feeling of being received without having to knock. Standing in front of a woman and realizing, with a kind of stunned animal gratitude, that nothing in me had to perform its way into the room. Her wanting did not make me feel powerful. That would have been easier to name. It made me feel safe enough to stop proving and alive enough to want her with my whole body.

He and I are not pretending anymore, we aren’t imagining next summer or tomorrow. We are one syllable away from forever, scars and all.