Ian 23

Ian,

 

You touch a place inside me I don't want to be touched.  I think that's what I mean, when I say that I felt free to fall in love with you.  I think I did, without your knowledge or consent. 

 

I like T.S. Eliot and I don't really apologize for it, because he knows about things being small the way I can sometimes feel.  My mother keeps things like it in a box shaped like a heart with a pink lid.  What's inside my heart...is a blue marble, candle flames, broken jawbones, a pair of ragged claws, coffee spoons, the universe, pressed into a ball. 

 

But...

 

I'm not the universe, unless it's made up of things like that; the things that fall out of the bottom of a pocket with a hole, that escape a fisherman's net, and cause irritation when caught in the weave of your sweater. 

 

I keep things like that.  I have boxes of them.  Because what matters is...remembering...I guess.  That all small things exist.  Maybe I'm collecting souls.  I saw your bag of gears.  I wonder if you do, too.  If it's what foxes do.

 

You touch those things, or where I keep them, or the person I am that does.  Where I'm frail and stupid and I have pockets full of feathers and tiny nubs of pencils.  I guess I lied a lot and said a soul was something else, but it's those.  I wonder if you know that.

 

I don't want you to touch me because I don't want you to see that for some reason, but you do, and you have, and it feels...

 

Like you know about what I am. 

Like you want to touch what it is. 

 

It might be a place in my heart, and it might be a place inside my pussy.  I have no idea, and it might be the same thing.  You push and I breathe in, and you breathe out, and you touch something, and I want...you...to stay there...because...that's where I'm always waiting for you, collecting the stupid magic of all unimportant things. 

 

In the room where they're kept, it's dark and the light from the window means it's overcast and afternoon.  It washes the shadows with something pale and ghostly.  I have my back to a wall, and driftwood in my hands, and you've tripped over a small spool of electrical wire, and we meet eyes, and you don't...ever say anything, but I cry until you do.

 

Love,

Annik