The wondering is what’s so tiresome. And it’s sleeping in that brings it on like a sponge absorbing something bitter — slowly and painfully, but rightfully. I pretend there’s no sunlight streaming in through the curtains of my bedroom window because I’m still reveling in the latest nighttime fantasy I have about you. It’s where dreams feel real and never-ending. Where you’re my husband, or boyfriend, or lover who says really meaningful things about the kind of couple we could be if either one of us got our shit together.
Where you live with me. Where we do things together after having sex. Like fiendishly eating microwaved pizza rolls, watching On Demand, or falling asleep with one another and yet still apart. Where you’re lying next to me in the morning light. Still sleeping and blanketed by sunshine. Still sighing in heavy breaths to the rhythm you’ve sent in waves across the mattress.
I even feel you there a solid moment before my eyes open up all the way to reality. And I’ll put it this way — the room seems darker in the morning when in solitude. Because, of course, you’re never there. You’re never going to be there, and the version of you that ever could be is one I’ve conjured in my head in such detail that I nearly believe it in real life. And the wondering — whether or not if you could be like that — ensues as walls of oncoming traffic would in commotion with my standing forever blissfully in the left-hand turn lane. Life rushes by and my emotions are so near collision but just out of reach to really know that it’s cataclysmic.
Burdened by my own hopeless and yet knowingly unattainable expectations, I drown in the feeling of wanting you. It accelerates the longer I know you. And I grow wearier still. A crumbling pile of annotations where you’re wonderful atop my weakened foundation.
Nothing I’ve really conjured is fair. So I must let it die now.
Pent-Up Aching Rivers 