Month: December 2007

santasm

When you left to me fight other battles in other hotel rooms, what went through your mind? When you hung up the phone and decided never to call me back, was it there in your hands a year later, the feeling of cradling the dead telephone receiver? I was sincere when I said I loved you. You seemed sincere when you told me there had been no one else like me.

Late night, early morning, thinking of the options that might have been, the holidays planned that never came to fruition. It’s like burning a phone book, riffling through these memories, endings listed with people who once called me lover. Superstitions. Only witches live at forks in the road. Stand on a kitchen table and you’ll never get married.

Thankfully this year has been a transformation. Burning bushes, music, addictive black hair. I’m told to stand still, a blanket held around my waist like the train in a Zeigfeild photo. The porch, now our porch, is chilly. He holds me close, the two of us together like a character study, and we talk as he smokes, tapping the ashes to fall, sparkling orange-red, ten stories down to the roof of the Staples building. We are a fire, mildly lighting the sky.

Later, scattered across months, someone else. He drives, I am the one with the map. We do this both literally and metaphorically. When he is away, which is always, I write almost every day, drawing lines, a road, the cartography of a place half way between, where one day we can meet and care for each other again.