I lie on bed with it on hot afternoons, it is the sweat on my skin, it is my lover in an empty room, the memory of his scent on the night I set everything I knew on fire.
I know the longing intimately, like a lover whose eyelids I kissed until I thought it wouldn't hurt him when I left, the longing is an old friend I sit with on evenings with coffee cooling in my hands, losing moments with myself to an easy daydream, a practiced routine of reminiscing, his name like the full moon on a summer night.
What do you do with a love like this that leaves you wanting and wanting and wanting and wanting.
Some days I think this quiet patience will outlive me and others I am teaching myself to swim in an ocean of waiting and wanting. I feel like I could wait for him for years like a starving infant and still be content with my emptiness when he doesn't ever return.
I wait, wilted rose of a woman, dry earth cracking beneath my feet, his name in my mouth like a prayer for rain.
I want time to stop when he's with me, each moment to stretch out in an endless infinity, held tenderly in my palms like an heirloom my mother taught me how to lose. I want to remember so much but I fear it will hurt too much when the time comes for me to want to forget , take too much undoing of my own skin.
How do you rewrite the past. If I shed all my skin will it still remember how your touch felt when it grows back. How do I teach it to forget?