In Suspension

My love is a whisper
My dream, a roar

Flung from a gilded cage, my soul
darts and flits, avoiding pause
Avoiding

          ... Stillness. Love. Him.

Avoiding another ending.

If I land, I may
                       lose my wings
                       shade this audacity
                       absorb

the weight of yet another
heavy, static love

In motion
I am illuminated, I am light.
It is only me.

          ... Apart. Lonely. Free.

Rhetoric

Words. We incessantly nitpick them. We assess the tone, the timing, the inflection in efforts to understand each other, convinced that the substance of our intentions is disguised among the syllables. We adhere to a phrase we can't decipher, rolling it over our tongues again and again. The answers must be in there.

Maybe this why I am so haunted by all he did not say, perpetually grasping to fill in the gaps of all I still fail to understand about him, about the decline of a love that once seemed so tender: instead of a single garish flaw to dissect, there are a multitude to consider, discard, consider again, agonize over... The guesswork is exhausting.

Did I imagine it all?  Or interpret trifles as something more? Did I make the mistake of my life and build a passion out of a repartee?

I asked. I asked him as our words waned, as our touches withdrew. I asked him at the end, when the silence had become a canyon. He remained silent.

And somewhere in the silence, he lost me.

The fatigue of second-guessing myself finally conquered my ardent romanticism. The ever increasing silence only made sense when I retreated into the hollow of a shell, built a wall to keep out the sound of anything but my own footsteps.

Occasionally, a brick falls. And in the sharp stillness that follows I hear the old, familiar refrain: I love you, I love you, I love you. But it has been so long now, so long since he has said the words - and the voice begins to sound more like my own. Am I still talking?

Dressed Up and Dreaming

I never understood all the fuss about weddings. I never considered what we would wear or how we would decorate or even the flavor of cake. When I thought about weddings, I thought about him smiling at me, a smile that would easily eclipse any tuxedo. And kissing each other. And the thrill of knowing he loved me that much.

I guess I wasn't concerned with the wedding; I wanted what came after. I wanted him to be my roots, my home, the thing that steadied me. I wanted to be the best part of his day, to fill those little in-between moments with the stuff of love: a heart drawn on a post-it note, a kiss as we passed in the hallway, a glass of wine brought to him as he typed...

I would have married him wearing a t-shirt, with no ado whatsoever, and happily gone home to build this life I wanted for us so very much.

But we never built that life. He didn't want it. Or he didn't want me. (I don't know; I didn't ask.) And after the dream dissipated, I began to feel contempt toward the idea of marriage. It seemed such a flighty notion, to build a tangible temple upon nothing but love - love, such an erratic, fickle, whimsical thing. Such a nebulous foundation. It was bound to crumble.

A week ago, I saw this gown.

   

And it tugged at the girlish reveries of romance I thought I had finally left behind. It wasn't so much the gown as what it represented: a steadfast love, one with enough faith and courage to build a temple, build a life and walk into the future together. Loving each other that much. Proof that sometimes taking the leap and investing all that love and hope and intimacy is so completely worth it, that sometimes the temple will last.

I want to be all dressed up in love again. It may be layers of the lightest tulle, like this gown, or it may be the soft cotton of an old favorite t-shirt. The fabric won't matter as long as it fits, as long as the seams are sewn well enough to last, as long as we can build a temple upon it.

Perfectionist

If there is a loose string, I am compelled to pull it. I cannot leave it there, let it go, admire the beauty of the many other perfect knots. I will keep coming back to that one stray piece again and again, itching for a way to weave it into the pattern; I will examine, smooth, braid, tuck. I will turn over the fabric, then turn it back again, then repeat. And, inevitably, my fiddling will be the true reason for its unraveling. The end will fray or the length will weaken... And then it will come undone.

Like an old, worn sweater. Like the edges of a hand-me-down rug. Like a disregarded love.