#7 Next Week

Next year, we’ll move to New York,

and we will live 

in a tiny apartment 

with the paint peeling off walls.

We’ll spend the evenings

sprawled on a green rug,

where you will write

and I will read,

and we’ll look around

at our things,

yours and mine,

books and memories and other

broken things

neatly stacked

on the steps of the ladder

in our loft.

We’ll walk bare-feet

on wooden floors, and drink

cheap wine for breakfast.

We’ll skip lunch

to make love on the terrace,

to the city lights and sounds.

We’ll look out the windows,

through pale yellow curtains 

and lean over

the potted blue-bells

that you picked

and I love

and we’ll watch the busy streets,
and the sparkling lights, we will

look up and feel small

and big, 

all at once

under the Manhattan skyline.

Next week, we'll  move to New York,

and we'll remember 

how, like children,
we were,
enthralled,

when we talked about living

in New York, and 

when we were in love.

As is wont with a heart broken like mine, I read some things over and over again.

I read them one more time, hoping that I will discover something that I haven’t caught before, some emotion that I inadvertently missed, some idiosyncrasy of yours I don’t already know so well, so bad.  I know now, more than I ever did, your favourite words and go-to metaphors. I seek solace in the way you break up your near-perfect sentences, the way you capitalize some words to personify the objects and obsessions that define you (and sometimes, us). I feel a certain warm familiarity when I predict a phrase that is coming even before you do, I seek succour in the intimacy I feel with your mind, your machine, with your “idiom”, if I may.

And as I read, as I am vindicated, I rest assured in the certain knowledge that even though everything else that I once thought infallible has been cruelly wrenched away from me now, I will always, unfailingly, have your words.