There’s something intrinsically maddening about the remnants of your lover’s past being delicately strewn across your present. How handwritten notes and tender memories linger in the air and discreetly hide themselves in cracks and crevices, tentatively waiting to be found. Each discovery sparking a bout of nervous energy, that curiously prods at bruises to see if they still hurt.
Those pockets of happiness once found in the arms of another and the cold cuts that later came, unexpectedly despite the warning signs. Each moment now reverberating through your body like a microscopic shockwave, that started a lifetime ago and has only now managed to catch up with you.
The touch of my skin inspires the curiosity of yours. Am I the reminder. Do my doe eyes bring you back to a time when your last love looked at you with such intent, you could almost hear your heart crack under the weight of the impending escape.
The echoes of your past lovers cause tremors in my moans and cries. I see their faces in my dreams at night, hauntingly, as if they wish to warn me of the dangers I have yet to face. They whisper indignantly, as I lay beside you, wondering why it is not they who do so anymore.
I taste the sorrow in your kiss at times, as if our embrace was transporting you back to a moment you had long since forgotten and now wish you could once again forget. I note the way in which you read passages aloud, as though in hope that they might hear.
Have faith, they said and you did, didn’t you and what become of that. The underlying sense of betrayal that now carries with you, so heavily, into our story, as a chapter rolls into another. Yet those characters have long been dead.
I see you think of them, as though your mind is projecting onto the bare walls that surround us. I feel the contemplation of what could have been, if only…I question whether I too, will be nothing more than a fragmented thought to you one day.
The tracing of your soft edges with my fingertips morphing into the touch of another. My scent gently becoming engrained in the linen where you will later lay with someone else. Will they ponder about the intricacies of our love as their lips meet yours in the dead of night, eyes closed, mind whirling.
Perhaps one day I too will be nothing more than a note laying dormant in your kitchen. Reminding you of times gone by, when we spoke of a future that never came to be.