Sunday, November 7, 2010

The date

I look aside and without staring at him in the eye I confess that I've missed him. Then I reach for the glass and take a hearty sip of my drink. It is easier to say things if I don't look at him and instead I fix my sight on an undetermined point of the restaurant, maybe the window or the reflection of the couple sitting on the table beside us. I notice that I've torn my napkin to pieces, and I have crumpled the scraps almost automatically into a ball that I hold tight in my fist. From there his hand is so distant, I can't touch it because he'll remove it as if he'd been stung. And when it starts raining and millions of small hands pound on the window, I remember the day that we first went to dinner together and he reached for my lips with his lips from across the table. My throat gets knotted up as I wait for him to say something. He says he's missed me too: it is just a simple natural polite reaction., what I've said hasn't affected him and he fidgets with his phone, he looks at it and reads something I'll never know what is. As he reads in his phone he lowers his head. From that angle the light hits a side of his face to reveals several wrinkles branching from the corner of his eye. I rejoice myself and I think that I'll be young in 10 years and that he'll be nearing 60, but then I see this as a way to relieve me, to transport myself to that moment in which this emotion will cease to exist.
I remind him of the night, about twelve months ago (one of many nights) in which I wasn't myself and I did what he did, and I drank what he drank, and when I went to see myself in the mirror I saw my nose bleed, and my nostrils were flaring hysterically. I washed my face frenetically as if if I wanted to erase that feeling of being extremely aware, awake and naked. Few minutes later I went back to his bedroom and I lied next to him as I put my head on his chest. I put my hand on his heart and I felt it beat rapidly like a hummingbirds. I fell asleep and a strange dream streamed off the sound of his heartbeat as if i was dragged into a tunnel. In the dream a wall of white bricks was falling as if shaken by the earth and shattered covering me completely in white dust. I woke up two hours later slobbering over him, my eyes were tired and swollen and my skin was dry.

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