Not the novel, the other one. This Is How You Lose Her. Also, I'm writing by the light of a votive candle, and outside my window is a cemetery. These things make me happier than they should.
The man across from me has such earnest, innocent eyes. When I can't sleep, I imagine how they would say goodbye.
In my favorite scenarios, the epiphany comes to me before he ever says anything; he is betrayed by the vaguely broken routine of everyday, ordinary things — the even number of glasses in his sink, the damp on the towel hanging by the door.
Tonight, it is ambush by toothbrush. I clean my teeth and that prosaic act of moving the brush up and down makes me think about all the other places I've done this before. All the bathrooms and sinks, in hotels and apartments, in planes and trains.
And then, like a well-worn dream, it comes. The almost inevitable realization that once again, I've folded myself into a pause, a tiny little slip, a lover who has been perfectly sized to fit into his spaces, time-stamped and transient.
And I think: this will be the last time I brush my teeth here.
And then: I may never pass this way again.
It shouldn't feel sad, but it always does. Even in my imagination.
I imagine myself to be a mistress too, sometimes.
He is married to some kind of ideal, some girl or lover he is saving himself up for, even though he doesn't know who she is or if she even exists. Or maybe he's already met her, but she hasn't gone through her metamorphosis yet, a butterfly in potentia, caged in some claustrophobic chrysalis. And their love story, with all the saccharine trimmings they now abhor but will one day revel in unashamedly, is still biding its time. And maybe there's nothing wrong with that.
The optimist in me wants to believe that women like me simply coast on being mistresses until we become someone's ideal ourselves. But I have a niggling idea that maybe we just like to pick men who will let us be, who will only ever be lovers, because the goddamn ideal in our heads is sacred, weightier than anything, and if we are honest with ourselves, it's really all we've ever had or known of love.
But tonight, I'm drunk enough to be truthful. And the truth of all truths is I want to make love to the you that lives in my head. I want to take you apart, and fill in the gaps with all these things I remember. Your fingers on the pages of my poetry. You asking to hold my hand. You telling me I'm beautiful and brilliant and benevolent. I listened and paid attention; I packed up every moment and memory. Like a child, I collected them all.
I want to lay stories on your pillow, built from bits and pieces you've deigned to show me, revelatory little glimpses, somehow unwitting, somehow unconstrained. I want to offer my body on your bed. I want to make you fall with touch and kiss and moan.
And maybe you won't be angry when, like some kind of Trojan horse, you find that I've snuck through your gates.
And maybe you won't care when the horse splits apart and I spill over.
And maybe you won't fight too hard when I conquer you this way.
But I'm still shuffling between time zones, and sand dunes, and snow drifts. Between borders, and smiles, and lives.
I am between the lines. I hate that in any literature of your life, I am only something you read between the lines.
Originally published on Tumblr, January 2013.