acts.
2005-11-01 8:40 a.m.
potential, the way women can bear childrennine months after any real decision,
or any accidental encounter,
the too close but once not close enough to hide eighteen years of life
under another title,
this is the way i have felt, waiting for you, that my hands and heart together knew their purposes
but did not know their places.
this is a tragedy in three acts, but the first two are almost over.
we're on our way to resolution.
alone, i escorted the blinds from the windows, carried the brush across the canvas to convince
some effort to come out, heralding my wrist with its accomplishments.
no such luck.
we'll get bound up in being disappointed, and between
the push i have and the pull he's given, we'll end up position, one across the sheets and the other calculating
next moves, both novices when it comes to loving.
this is something i would not
a year ago
have admitted - that i am young and inexperienced, unsure of what it means to be committed irrevocably,
that i have turned in my own heavy rotation, a strange and distant planet
in a sea of human beings who seemed hard wired into conversations, who made connections easily, while i went grasping at the thinnest of encounters, those men upon the streets to whom i became a witness, starry eyed and waiting just to see
what secrets they might keep for the times when no one was looking
meant nothing more than existential longing, served as reminders that i knew my part and wasn't playing it correctly.
i have stumbled, catching at my legs as though they knew how to balance, catching at his hands now, instead,
how terrible i must be, to pass this curse onto another, who claims he knows exactly what it means to be uncertain, who believes there is some depth in me worth knowing.
this is a tragedy in three acts, but the first two are almost over, and we'll go home to our own possessions, familiar bodies waiting to be pressed in familiar places.