A Fluttering of Paper

Listen. It won't work. I've walked long enough in that half world. I've stopped by your bed and kissed you as you slept. It all vanishes. No one ever remembers, not really.

That's why we write it down, so we can remember; but that's even worse, because what we remember when we read them is just the words we wrote, just the infection of loss. We want to move backwards, to the place before the words, but do we even have a way of knowing there was a place before the words? Did I ever kiss you, or did I just read about a kiss, and write it down again, one of a long long line of conspirators in the fiction of kisses, setting the next generation up for the same fall?

I kneel down, careful not to wake you, and kiss your cheek, there where the color is high and your skin is so warm, so warm that it warms even my hungry-ghost mouth, making me think of a child's hot chocolate under the ski-lift housing, or of the grateful first sip of whiskey, or of blue smoke blown back over the lips, still warm from the match. This is as close as we get. What made us think there was anything else?

What we asked for, what we've known, is only a fluttering of paper in the gutter. Our dreams have become transparent, indistinct, unreal. In the end we are just looking for a corner where we can be alone.

This, by the way, so far as it relates to real life, relates to the break-up of a friend of mine, and not to me or mine.