The worst part is that I don’t allow myself to completely know you.
I sit here looking at your legs: you’re lying on the dog’s bed in front of the heater in our shitty three bedroom with the massive yard that we LOVE, reading some sci-fi book you’ve been waiting weeks to read – and it’s like I’m looking at them for the first time, your legs, when I can still, STILL, picture the skin on his knees and the hair on the tops of his feet so clearly.
Have you heard the idea of your heart being written on by each of your loves?
The first one so completely, with massive scrawlings of declarations of forever and mr’s and mrs’s his last name, and then later, number two comes along and you think there is nowhere left for you to fill! My heart is completely drawn on!
But slowly, slowly, surely, surely, he fills the margins and the spaces between words and gaps in letters and NOW YOU ARE FULL and THERE COULDN’T POSSIBLY BE SPACE for anyone else.
And yet:
Here you are.
And futileIy let you fill some spaces, the middle of ‘O’s and the lines of ‘E’s, but I still find it too hard to let you take over – there doesn’t seem to be space even if I wanted you to – and here we are: me looking at your legs for what feels like the first time, all the while picturing the freckles under his eyes, sitting across from him in that little Czech town, drinking dark ale at a picnic table.