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