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there was that first saturday together, an hour to drink coffee before the start of the weekend. february 2008. wasn’t i on my way to pray somewhere with a friend and you had nothing to do but receive my call at 9am and come to me. it was our third date by then, still the first week after we met. we walked to a coffee shop near my apartment, sat on a cement bench. i caressed your knee with one hand, my mocha in the other. i wore a hot pink shirt that showed my shoulders, chocolate straps showing from beneath. tiger’s eye earrings you mistook for wood, your favorite vibration. then we came home to my bedroom, sat on my mahogany satin couch. you wore a hat with a bill, i slid it away from me to reach your mouth. i never wanted to stop our lingual dance: warm, passionate, perfectly matched. that kiss, that energy, that chemistry, were things i wanted to keep.

the curiosity of your lips–pink ambassadors to a mouthful of white capricorn teeth, beautifully square and even. your knees beneath my fingers, as if there were no denim between my fingertips and your skin. knowing those joints, the hardness of their bones, would fall victim to my touch. maybe i loved you, after all, for your helplessness against me.

i regret nothing, certainly not the lesson in futility. a hundred lifetimes spent hearing words that stabbed like knives, acid raining into my growing heart. that first saturday, your breath tasted of nothing more bitter than coffee, no pain had yet been delivered from between those white, even teeth. that, like so many other realities, came later.

eight weeks after i leave you, i sit alone in bed under a down blanket, hoping it doesn’t storm tonight. praying sky’s tears don’t drum against the roof. i don’t want another reminder of those nights, last december, when it rained hard for twenty days in a row, a painted wood ceiling above us, making love to the man who lied to me, who said he wanted to live his life by my side and father my children. who convinced me that distance and my own deficiency were the reasons i had never seen his family, his hometown, his true self.

the sky is black and clear, the night cold and the moon new. a light shines in a neighbor’s window; i am not the only insomniac grieving at midnight. it is tomorrow; the sun held back for another five hours, but morning here. keep the darkness still; let the sweetness of loss absorb completely, let those wasted lifetimes coagulate, echoes of a single utterance — one that could not be silenced. speech unable to resist the temptation, the glory, of sound.

© 2010 tahminah zaman