SHE.

She is what I always write towards, perhaps in an effort to hold onto what is everyday slipping away.

How are you feeling? I ask her each evening on the phone, watching an imagined idea of her moving through an empty house.

I am eating cereal, she tells me.

You are at the kitchen table, I say. I see you there.

Lost another three pounds, she says and I ask her to please pour herself another bowl.

I.

I think of her at night, mostly. After the sun has set too early for California.

I thought it would be lighter here.

I thought I would be lighter here.

WANT.

I want to lie completely naked on an unmade bed. In the afternoon light I’ll spread out over blue cotton sheets while a wavy haired French woman cradles my head with her knee caps and Paris passes by on the street outside our window.

I want to be deliciously tired and slip into sleep there, waking only when it’s dark outside and she is standing by the window screwing the backs onto her earrings.

I want to pour reams. Pour cups of peppermint tea, sitting at a blue writing desk in front of a window in an apartment that’s not mine. I want to claim the space. Look out the window at white buds blooming out of green leaves. I want to slip into sleeves and walk down stairs and out onto the street where I can wander about, alone, and buy bites of French bread and sodas in glass bottles with straws in their necks.

I want to trace lines of equus over the bones of my own body. To let time wash over in waves the way it did when I was seven and small and they were this dream. Like lovers almost. Their presence providing embodiment; the realization of some essential piece of me.

I go to him at night. Run palms over the lines of leg and muscle and hair. He moves under my touch like so much frenzy and I want to force him down and this, I realize, is where I become grown up again. That need to harness such ritious beauty.

But when I breathe deep and touch his face and think that I may break he quiets and I can lie on my back, hang arms over his back, and look up at the stars.

WISH.

Wish she wouldn’t email me back from another continent to tell me not to worry.

As if I wasn’t there when she was not. As if I didn’t wheel her down fluorescent bulbed hallways, into pastel painted waiting rooms.

As if I didn’t feel the way her forehead creased with the pain of it or sweated with the drugs for it.

As if I don’t remember how she looked propped up on that gurney with tears rolling down, reaching for my hand and saying, I’m right here.

And I wish his phone wouldn’t ring four times before that rhythmic recording kicks in with a burst of energetic bullshit, Hi this is George I’m sorry I missed your call please leave a message and I’ll get back to you at my earliest opportunity.

Wish I didn’t know he will never answer.

Wish I didn’t know she won’t always answer.