the habit of being

When she loved me she loved me for qualities that were not mine. She loved me for the things I admired, those things I found in her. I never even knew what Vienna meant. The city is lost to her esoteric eyes. She taught me to lust and yearn and desire under a guise of marred amity.

The first year without we played false stoics from far away corners while burning from excessive vilification. Or so it seemed to me. Loving warriors were we, or separate incongruous fishers. I tried to make men of little boys I’d never laid eyes on while she wore herion (heroine?) orange eyeshadows into and out of a life I’ve never known.

We were both drippings of the moon goddess. We waxed and waned in one another’s electronic boxes. It was a hypothetical friendship on a good day. It seemed when she played the ascetic trout I played the hedonistic salmon or the other way around. moments we acquiesced and coalesced and other lovely words were saccharine but still true although fused together with nothing more than spit and preliterary rambles.

We journeyed forward without letting go of one anothers dress hems but completely free of nostalgia.

Then we saw one another first and I could not get over her beauty. One said it of me but -I- can only say of her that I saw living art. We flopped around on the shore 1 to 1.3 feet apart the entire time of our close quarters that first summer. There were the notes in the car I still believe will make money for us one day. Money for Vienna and flowers. I keep them in a blue file folder on my bookshelf with the pages upon pages of letters she’s written to me I probably never even attempted replies to and other impressive volumes many of which I’ve never even read.

We did lushness together in Atlanta. Earlier we’d looked through the foreign fashion mags in a bookstore counting the bare breasts and there was a model she thought looked like me. Many looked like her without the eyes. And we saw Ani DiFranco and I was awed and she wasn’t impressed. We swayed a bit because we were much too inhibited to attempt to dance in the fourth row center seats we stole. There was discussion of the butterfly winged girls on the lawn. We gave them all personalities. She looked like young Audrey that day. It was the first time I felt such a possessive twang. I felt empowered by being there with her. We smiled a few slight smiles and I couldn’t afford a t-shirt.

We pretended to get used to one another, but I continued to be amazed . I got used to having a face to wake up to in the morning. I like to think she rejuvenated me then, made me less pedestrian, gave me the exemplary object of lust and envy I regard so tenderly today, but it was over two years ago and I wonder at my memory’s levity and fickle nature. The last night I curled up against her back and cried.