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When you put your arms around me and I close my eyes, everything except your body disappears. I press my face against your chest, my eyes all wet, and sometimes I pull away and see that I have left satisfying evidence of tears on your shirt. I will admire the evidence covertly. It looks like a Rorschach blot or a foodstain. When I close my eyes, you could be anyone. Sometimes I forget your name. I can even forget who you are while you are speaking to me, if I want to, if I keep my eyes shut, if I try hard enough. It’s not just you who disappears when I shut my eyes. The ones before you disappeared too. All of your arms, your t-shirts, your reluctant acts of comfort, all of you feel exactly the same and it doesn’t matter to me anymore who any of you are.
My Dreams in the Necessary Compartments
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When the words expand, their spines are creased like cardboard accordion files. They grow into the shapes of organs: liver, kidney, heart, gall bladder, heart. The way I dream about the words that come out of your mouth and their shapes and their functions makes me queasy. I associate the sounds of my clock radio now with monkeys, because we once had a conversation about your wife’s work with animals. I wake up thinking about cages.
Where she works, they have mice and owls and monkeys there. All of them in cages. The monkeys’ organs are not dreamlike and neither are your words, ever. This is not the point. The point is the winningness of your smile and the point is that maybe I cannot make you love me but I can make others who are not as important as you love me and the point is that if I have enough of those others your love will seem unnecessary.
We drink coffee and sit in on a bench where people drink coffee sometimes and again I ask you not to mention your wife’s name and then I cry for a while and notice a cigarette butt nested inside the leaves of a clinical looking bush, a bush that has likely been planted for reasons of water conservation. I wonder if I left the cigarette there and am overcome. I am overcome with guilt until I remember that I haven’t smoked in years.
We walk back to my apartment and you take your dick out of your pants without kissing me and my knees clap against the hardwood floor and my eyes level with your zipper. I think that this won’t be pleasant with the taste of coffee still coating the inside of my mouth like a thin flat ghost but it only takes five minutes anyway and you are gone again and now the ghost just tastes different; thicker.
I think about how special you are. I decide again that I love you. You call me as soon as you’re on the freeway. You ask me a question about work. I answer, although I’d rather not talk about work after 5 pm. I try to change the subject.
“What does ____ do with the animals? What does she do with the owls?”
“I don’t know. I try not to think about it.”
It’s okay that she works in a lab that does things to animals because that lab will cure diseases and one day so many diseases will be cured that no one will ever die. I think about telling you this, to alleviate your concern, but you ask me another question about work so I sit down at my computer and reference the documents I need in order to answer your question sufficiently. I rifle through my accordion file even though it is unlikely that I will find the necessary paperwork there to answer your follow-up questions and the accordion file reminds me of your words and of monkey organs and I am concerned that all of these things have been mixed together and I do not know how to contain my life and my thoughts and my dreams in the necessary compartments. You hang up when you reach your door, cut me off mid-sentence and I understand that you do this to spare me the sound of your wife’s voice in the background, so I don’t mind. I don’t mind and I cannot fault you.
The point is that I will collect love. I will collect so many different types of love that I will forget what love is at all and it will make your love seem unnecessary and I will collect so many different types of love that I will forget their names and I will forget their voices and I will forget what words look or feel like and I will forget about the difference between necessary love and unnecessary love and so many ghosts will live inside my mouth that I will forget what yours tastes like.