Rewriting II

As we left the store, you walked ahead of me, carrying our shopping bag.  I lagged behind, holding the pie box in my arms, making a point of memorizing everything about the store and the feeling.  Time was tangible.  I felt old but I wasn’t scared. From the doorway you looked back at me, “You’re going to write about this, aren’t you?” 

[You had already read me.  Did that change everything?]

In Love

I am agnostic at best.

Disclaimer:

The point here is to be artful.

Rewriting

I wrote in my notebook: We are beautiful, broken things.  That’s how [I thought] we were then.  If we were in bed, you were on your laptop.  Sometimes I was on mine, sometimes I just sat there wishing you would close the screen and kiss me.  But each time you finally closed the laptop, you went to sleep and I would lay beside you in the dark, my body just barely touching yours.  But each time we went to sleep, I would lay beside you in the dark. When those nights first began to occur and then reoccur, I would align my body with the back of yours and wrap my arm around you, laying my hand over yours, just the way I knew you liked and I would hope that you loved it.  [If we were broken, our breaks complimented each other and we fit together.]

Winter is Hell

It’s November and I can smell winter in the air.  I can smell Christmas, Vermouth, snow, fresh linen, rape.  The cold catches in my throat like tears, like screams.  I can taste it as it whistles and whips in between my teeth – snow, puke, the word: no.  It’s winter again and I am almost lost again.  Lost inside the loneliness of nowhere to spend the holidays, the fear and self-loathing of being alone, and the image of finding my clothes on a stranger’s floor, snow outside his window.  Hell doesn’t freeze over.

This is the rewrite.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

The first time we had sex it was morning and the September Sunday sun was shining brightly through your blinds.  The first time we had sex with the lights off, your face came towards mine and I saw his face and it felt like my breath was caught in my throat.  I wasn’t with you anymore – or you weren’t you anymore.  You were him and your bed was his bed and I was suffocating under an invisible pillow of fear and all I could see was bright eyes and the outline of a head above mine in the dark.  Then the head pressed its cheek against my cheek and I could no longer see eyes.  I could see nothing.  But I could feel the difference -- your skin on mine and your breathing and the way you took my hand and linked your fingers with mine.  You were you again and I wanted to cry.  I squinted my eyes against the feeling.  I was supposed to be fine.  There had never been any bruises and I had never even cried.  Months had gone by and I had thought I was fine and then I had met you and I was even happy.  And then, there it was: the first real proof that I was not fine.  I listened to the sound of your breath against my ear and I placed the palm of my hand on the back of your neck.  I memorized the details like a prayer.  Your body began to feel like a blanket over me and I wrapped myself up in the feeling.

*The title is from a Joan Didion's essay "The White Album"