Hard Truth

Some nights when I couldn’t sleep, I would lay awake with your body enveloped in the curve of my own, because that was exactly how you most liked to be held.  And in the beginning, when we kissed, it felt like time was rendered obsolete, for it felt like a beginning and a forever simultaneously.  And I would think to myself that that must be heaven: time rendered obsolete. 

But there were times when every idea I ever had of love and understanding felt crushed by the feeling I had that it would always be possible to awaken in the dark beside your sleeping body and think and write and be someone that you didn’t realize you didn’t know. 

And so sometimes I would drink until I thought I had drank enough to let you know me, to tell you stories of where I came from, who I had known and who I’d been.  They were hard stories that caught in my gin drunk mouth like gravel, crunching and chipping between my teeth.  I came out sounding all wrong.  But what I was trying to tell you was that someone like you couldn’t possibly love someone like me who had nothing to offer you but a slow smile and a mean tongue.  That was the trouble: I loved you as badly and I wanted you to love me but I hated you because when I was with you I couldn’t love myself.