today I am wearing your shirt.

it is hidden beneath a thick, bulky sweater
because I need something you to hold on to, to physically feel.
I feel this inane need to protect it from the gaze of strangers
who wouldn't even know it was yours,
who wouldn't know your shirt
from my shirt
from any old shirt anywhere
and who wouldn't care.

it is hot today,
unseasonably so,
and I am buried in this mammoth sweater,
sweating, for
no
fucking
reason,
waiting in a frenzied haze of shallow breathing
and racing thoughts
for a response, any response,
to the fragile, pathetic little message my fingers sent before my brain could intervene that asked
quietly,
meagerly,
pitifully
are you going to break up with me?

what it takes (i guess)

not the death of two (younger) siblings;
the first a 23 year old sister struck by a car on her nightly run,
the second a brother in his 50s,
who came home from work
to take a nap on the couch
and lose his battle with lung cancer,
leaving his wife with three growing sons and no means to pay the bills,
or the death of both parents:
the sudden diagnosis and the rapid way it took her mother,
the lengthy decline of her father who held on to the bitter end,
keeping his grandchildren awake in fits of giggles with his loud, middle-of-the-night singing
and other equally amusing side effects of senility.
nor 30-odd years of struggling to pay the bills,
while feeding and clothing and raising six (SIX!) daughters
on the income of an exhausted, overworked husband.

no, no
it was my sister,
23 and fickle,
breaking up with her Catholic boyfriend of four years without a care in the world
to drive across the country with a 20 year old redhead
some punk kid she met in a bar
that at last drove my stoic martyr -- i mean mother -- to tears
that she was not too ashamed to silently bury into her pillow
and then deny afterwards.

we met at a wedding

and spent the night in drunken conversation.
we were both nursing broken hearts,
finishing summers spent wallowing in the senselessness of loving the disloyal.
you laughed at my clumsy youth through the haze of vodka tonics
while i wondered if you'd kiss me.

months and months and months of
s l o w l y
getting to know each other,
trading secrets and ideas
while i pretended not to notice
you pretending not to notice
that i had purposely unbuttoned my shirt.

fastforwardto:

four in the morning
when you whisper my name so quietly that i wonder if you're hoping i'm asleep,
and my response comes out so urgently it sounds as if i was afraid it would get stuck in my throat.
you inhale
and everything but my heart stops,
fixes in place for years
until you speak.

"i love you."


the world picks up again, only now
there is no one in it but you.