The Land Of Might Have Been

Forgetting is harder than remembering

In my mind, I wake to your fingertips on my neck as you brush my hair away.

You lean in, and in the brilliant gleam of white cotton and hotel linen, your skin burns hot, yellow blue and peach. You are Picasso and I give in to you as your one night muse.

I know the weight of each hand on my waist and the soft kind dark of your eyes, the schoolboy who inhabits the man and still fears the judgement of women. I know the curve of your mouth and the suddenness of your tongue, the ache of your lungs to feel that euphoria once more.

I will play the part as well I can, but I am too hard, sour and dark, fine china without the trust to love.

But I never went as far as your bed, further still from your heart. I exist in cast offs, discarded with each new success as you climb towards something. Do you know what? I don’t. I don’t think you do either. But the climb distracts you from the shaking sadness in your ribs and throat.

But in your head, you kissed me. You have danced in the pixels of my eyes and the swallow songs of lucid dreaming far longer than your tongue will confess. You washed me with flattery and made me a goddess. You have made lust to my soul and I fell for your kindness. And now, in the hollowness of an incomplete affair, all is undone and unsaid.

And you have moved on, I have said too much and felt too deeply. I have been wrung dry of hot sensuality and the ugly bones of ambition and need run bare through my curves and cleavage. Too sharp, too much, too many ghosts in the machine. And I am nothing but discarded photographs and discarded evenings. I know you intimately. But in you knowing me, I am flawed.

But now I must let you go. Overnight you have untied your ship and gone down stream and I must wait out the storm of your leaving. Unanswered letters and cold dial tones will flutter past until my lungs accept your absence. I will, in time.

But how much harder it is to say goodbye to what almost never was?