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I Have Needs
I feel like a widow
sometimes. It's very hard to get to sleep unless thoroughly exhausted.
It's a bit easier to sleep on the sofa rather than in "our" bed.
It's terrible to wake in the night reaching for someone who is never going
to be there. The taste of him is in my mouth, which aches for his,
and my body cramps in need of his shape to mold it by. I cannot get
comfortable in the bed, regardless of position. And it is too quiet.
The children make no sound in their breathing, and neither do I.
It is not a perpetual
agony. I do wear myself out as much as possible, that when I fall,
it takes only a little reading to bring me over into shadowy rest.
I wish I had all the
words now that ran through me last night, words acutely describing my need,
my hunger, my loneliness, and how I will go on and be just fine, more or
less. While I have the sorrow of his absence, I have the joy of exposure
also, because unlike most widows, I still have the ghost of the lover in
the presence of the friend, whom I see from time to time.
I saw him Saturday
for lunch, and it was a cheerful lunch, though stressed by the wildness
of my children, who make it hard to conduct a conversation with any adult.
The previous time we'd had lunch, he kissed me briefly at parting, and
it surprised me. Saturday, I was hoping he would not kiss me, though
his kisses are droplets of happiness, so are they also too powerful to
withstand in a fragile frame of heart.
He hugged me robustly,
and I him, and I did not permit the opportunity of a kiss, but he took
my hand and squeezed my bony fingers in his fleshy ones, and I didn't want
him to let go. But the cold rain sliced down and the children had
need of me. We let go.
I spent a scandalous
amount of money at MotoPhoto, where I will never again go, to develop two
rolls of film. There were Xmas pictures of my boys in their Spiderman
pajamas. There were blurry and useless images of my cats. There
were equally blurry and useless images of the art we recently made involving
a door, a hot glue gun, and many artifacts. There were gorgeous pictures
of Sweden and Copenhagen, and Wlofie and Pat. There were two pictures
of Rebar on the phone, in a turtleneck and underwear, the phone having
rung before he was done dressing. His unbearable cuteness at that
moment had overcome me and I snapped two shots. One of these I have
cropped for my wallet, cut above the waist for two reasons. One is
that the picture would be too big for the wallet if I included his lower
half. The other is that I don't really want to be reminded just now
that we both considered my place to be his home.
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