A Few Years' Distance

I'm sitting in his apartment. The song he hates is playing. I look out the window I've opened to freshen the stifling room - I see the black bars of the tiny fire escape balcony. Despite their thinness and seeming flimsiness, they remain unforgivingly strong. They occlude my view of the outside world, only affording me glimpses of little pieces and making the room a small prison.

He's at work, feeling sorry for himself. He's unhappy a lot; I don't question the sincerity of his despair when it appears, only the notion that he's the only one who feels it. There is no doubt of the fact that everyone feels and thinks with the same depth and profundity that he does - the difference between him and "the rest," as I imagine he would view it, is that he is able to articulate - only when he chooses, of course - what tugs at his soul. He emotes through wods, filling little lined books with pages and pages of uncertainties, misgivings, deaths inside.

He still has no idea who he is; he thinks he's struggling to find a definition for love, the meaning of which will elude him until he has at least begins to grope at what holds him together.

He can't see the futility of it all, and in his eternal focus on it, he has put me in a box.

He looks at me - all he knows about me is what he can see and what he hears me say.

I'm small to him - I've been reduced to a player in his drama - a character hindering him (the hero?) from himself.

He surveys my face - noticing the makeup.

He watches my body, seeing my clothes, and beyond that, my flesh. Nothing more.

I resent it.

I can feel the anger rising from my indignant intellect - who the fuck is he? Why have I been trivialized this way?

More importantly, why am I still here? I continue to invest in what has become a cheap, trite, poor plotline.

When I'm not here, he sits in the dark, listening to music, pondering the same old questions that forever bubble to the surface of his mind, smoking a joint.

As soon as he is satisfactorily distracted, eyes glazed over, he leans forward on the sofa I'm sitting on now, holding the stub upright between his thumb and forefinger, watching it glow for a moment. His eyes lose focus, not unlike a newborn.

In one sudden movement, he brings his hand down and extiguishes it. The ashtray may as well be my open hand.

Smoke snakes up into the darknesss, dissolving into the stifling, heavy air.

Some Years Ago Too.

She stirred, drifting reluctantly into the waking world. Wisps of her dreams floated around her foggy mind, fading almost immediately as they appeared. Her consciousness spread languidly over her whole body; she could feel the flesh of her toes sticking together with the sweat of the past ten hours. She curled her foot forward and spread her toes, flattening the tent her feet had made in the cool, worn sheets. She became aware of the presence of cotton where it clung slightly to various areas of her form. She felt it on her left shin, her right inner thigh, the flat boniness of the top of her foot, both of her slightly protruding hipbones, her chest. The girl/woman/young lady straightened her bent arms above her head and lowered them back, where they collided unexpectedly with a wall. She was in his apartment, she remembered. The need to see his face interrupted her thoughts. She lifted the sheet from her body so as not to wake him with the swishing sound of skin moving against cloth. As noiselessly as possible, the girl shifted her weight from her back to her side so that her face was even with his. They were nose to nose. Her eyes traveled slowly and curiously over his face, looking for a flinch, a breath, anything that would hint at what he was thinking. In vain. His thoughts were occluded by his deep sleep. She stared intensely at his eyes, watching his eyeballs move around inside their sockets, underneath his eyelids. His skin was slightly translucent there; she could see the capillaries that webbed over it, creating faint purplish-blue lines. He sighed suddenly, eyebrows jumping towards the short wild curls. More than anything, she felt she needed to know what that thought was, what any of his thoughts were, whatever it was that wasn't being said in waking. She suspected with increasing certainty that such knowledge would change everything.
She was trapped, really.She'd always want that something to be revealed to her; she'd always look for it - in a gaze, a word, a mumbled song, a gift, a comment, even an unconscious reaction. The girl knew in all likelihood that this would never happen, but this was an eternally hopefully girl. She was that kind of girl who, though well-versed in the idea that such childish pursuits never yielded the dream they promised would result, refused to abandon the idea that things always turn out in the end.
So she kept laying next to him, watching his face, losing herself in the aforementioned foolishly optimistic reverie. They were together, but each alone...he in his dream-filled slumber, she in her dream-filled waking. She would never know his thoughts in that moment. She filed the moment among the numerous other moments of separateness she had felt and, leaning forward, woke him with a soft kiss between the eyes.
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she could've rhymed with anyone
instead she chose a poet
who'd recently become aware
he could love her and didn't know it

Some Years Ago.

I awoke in a panic, rushed to the window, pushed my nose to the glass in desperation of a source unknown...on the other side of the glass, I found nothing familiar in the faces, the interactions, the relationships I could see. I watched and watched and watched, wanting to feel even a flicker of recognition, straining at God knows what until my jaw was clenched so tightly I thought my teeth would crack. I stood like that for a minute, or maybe it was an hour or a day or a year. I felt the sun warm my face and then watched its light slip away into the night. I laid down on my side, in my bed, still facing the window in unfounded anticipation. I laid like that until my neck cramped and my face fell asleep, until I wanted to move but could not - I couldn't turn away. Just when I knew I would lay there forever, was resigned to watching without reward, I felt a warm hand creeping around my side, then an arm slung around my waist. Startled, I turned my face from the window, shifted my weight slowly from my left side to my back, then my right side. He didn't even know; he was asleep. My urgency, my compulsion dissolved at the touch...the weight of his arm was familiar...my panic subsided...I slept.