The dream came to me unwanted in the night. I thought that I was tired enough to sink so far down you couldn't find me in dreams, but I was wrong, so wrong. I replay some episode with you again, feel the emotions again, experience the pain again.
The tension, always on edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Knowing there was some invisible sickness in the relationship, some terminal illness which would finally put my love for you to death once and for all. One part of me desperately wanting to avoid whatever was coming, that other part of me saying "go ahead, kill it and have done".
When I met you I was taken without a struggle, captured before I knew what had happened. You looked like Sigourney Weaver, the young Sigourney in Alien, but with differences aplenty. Where her eyes are dark, your are flashes of emerald lightning. Her face is just a bit sharper than yours. Your slightly broader features are like a savannah, spread out beneath the sun, a place where lions loll before they rise to kill. Your body is broader too, by just a bit, becoming a more lush garden. Your garden wasn't for the cultivation of herbs or grape tomatoes, not at all. You were ground fit for rich cantalope, perhaps ripe corn, juicy and succulent, sense-engulfing. You were a field made for rolling in, wheat chaff littering my disheveled hair, dust tickling my nose.
I learned the garden had snakes too, the kind who bite, inject venom which paralyzes the prey, a venom of undilute sorrow. The venom which makes it impossible to move or breathe. All that is left is the ability to feel. How did you manage to keep him on the line all those months and I never caught a whiff of your guile? Truth be told, there was a scent, that feel of coming doom. I could never define it, put a name to it. The name was Jim, wasn't it? Jim, who showed up when I was out of town, earning a living, paying your bills. Jim, who was a gardener too, plucking those grapes while the vineyard was unguarded.
Months after the parting I thought I saw you. It was at a local club and I had forced myself to go, to be with people, to soak myself in the light and sound to try and convince myself I was still alive. God, you looked marvelous. You looked 20 pounds lighter, 10 years younger, the dress you wore a dark, off-one-shoulder affair which hinted and beckoned. I saw you and felt like a criminal, guilty of some unknown crime. I felt the blood rise to my face, felt the blush come, my eyes shift away, stupid with want.
I slipped out the door and drove a short distance and called our apartment, the one we had shared when we were together. I knew it would ring, ring, ring away unanswered. Imagine my shock when you picked up and said hello. I softly clicked the receiver down, hurt and wondering at what I'd just done. I had to call, had to find out if it was you. Like always where you were concerned, I had no control.
I sat in the misty rain on a concrete wall which ran just by the pay phone, remembering. The images were mixed up with the movie scenes, Sigourney running, you standing still, watching my van pull out of the driveway that last time, totally dry eyed. I felt the cool misty rain start to drip down my hair, down my cheeks, hiding the salty tears which had come unbidden. I sat there and watched in my minds eye the creature who you were burst through my bony chest and eat my heart yet again.