I am amazed by how my words increasingly mean nothing to me now.
I dream of an old, old lover who I have not considered in years. I wake with his arms and lips and sex dripping all through my mouth and eyes; his art is in my ears again and I can feel my skin grow heavy with words and fingertips, thick black hair and averted eyes.
We make love the way we used to, when I believed that I could grow inside of the holes he left for me. I know in my pseudo-waking mind that I am cheating on my present partner, but somehow it does not feel like infidelity. It feels like a dream, and it feels like home to be in the arms of a man I know I can never love enough because he will never let me get that close.
These illusions weave past me with nauseating speed until I am sick with wakefulness and yet still heavy with sleep. This lover of my dreams and of my past is gone and yet his breath still hangs on my skin.
So much time….
I know now that he reads exactly like the book he wrote, and that the spaces between the text, pungent with meanings I cannot fathom, are best from some distance where I cannot know the hollows inside of them. I know that my imagination is better than what could have ever gone on behind what I am reading.
(I have always been inclined to love the things I cannot hold. And I am reminded now that this dream was the most elegant and most elusive of them all.)