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I reach for your face, sliding my index finger underneath your serious eyes.
"John?" I ask. I know it is you. There is no mistaking the regality in the sharpness of your nose or the shadowed dimple in your chin. But still, I ask, because your hair is no longer gelled and quaffed and you've grown a small mustache.
You say my name and your gaze falls to the hand thumbing your cheeks.
My skin is still tingling from the moment I saw you roaming with the other men. Your new, big band. How small I feel sitting across from you on the sofa. Your bandmates are somewhere else in this big house, some actor's place and a party den. You'd ushered me in when you saw that I had seen. You are not a reminiscing man, but maybe I am enough.
"You look very different," I say finally and pull from you. You look fresh and smell of cinnamon sugar, such a displacement from your golden brown tone of the last decade. "Smell different."
You bring your leg onto the couch and fold it under you. You are cross-legged, not truly my session man. "Don't like it, I take it?" The corner of your mouth pulls up just a bit.
Your pronunciation, your voice, remains and my realization soothes slightly. "How are you?" I ask.
Nodding to yourself just a bit, you tell me you're alright. You look to me in that polite, habitual way and I say I'm well, too, even though I am not. My body fizzles like soda water. So much so that I turn to you and burst out:
"Why'd you leave without telling me?"
Your honey eyebrows raise. You shift on the couch, your leather boots squeaking against the leather cushions. "I had no time. We were already leaving for Scandinavia when you started school again."
My mouth opens like a fish. My lips touch together many times before I'm able to speak again. "But you could have written me. . ."
I felt myself losing you during our last summer. As the sessions piled up and your dark-haired colleague pulled you from me, I gathered myself in my work.
Someone comes around with a plate of biscuits for us, but you wave them along and shake your head at me. "I suppose I should have. We were both busy by then."
A part of myself agrees with you and I turn to scrutinize the fraying edge of my skirt. There's silence between us with the world all around.
"You finished your degree?" You ask me. You have always been able to sense when my mind falls away to other places, when I leave the present.
I hum in affirmation. Being here, unable to speak for a moment while you sit beside me with your watching gaze, reminds me of our times together. I would read silently as you observed. You would speak up, your voice mild and low, and tell me how beautiful I looked while concentrating. I would give up my reading at that point in exchange for your kisses.
My belly warms with memory. "I miss you. I have missed you." The words hover in the stuffy air of this house. I'm finished playing with my skirt. I want to reach for your dark cordorouys and touch the wiry grooves. But I resist and stare, instead, at the zipper of your boots and how the zipper tab peeks from just below your pant cuff.
"It's strange not having you around." Your own somber way of saying you've missed me.
I cannot sit in it, that feeling of being wanted by you, for long. Your singer comes around the corner looking for you. He's a chevalier, missing his feathered hat and fluffy cuffs.
"We're taking a picture," he says. And waits for you to stand and follow. You rise and the couch creaks. My throat creaks will all unsaid.
You clear your throat and look down at me. Your glossy hair waterfalls your shoulders. "You'll wait for me?" You ask.
A moment of time passes until I shake my head. "No, I don't think so." Because I'm not one for rebuilding.
Your expression changes so suddenly. Sullen and wounded. I feel that I'm staring at my own face on the day you left without a word.
"Don't worry, John," your singer says from the entryway, his waving hand a fishing line lure.
You seem to take his words deeply as you straighten your back and leave the room, the spiced scent of you drifting all around me.
Once again, I'm alone.
For the very very wonderful -starsailor I'm so very in love with this song. It's right up my alley and I hope I did it justice in this first piece. Inspired by the way you write pain in your works, how bodily it is. Thank you all for reading :)
