delicious ambiguity

Looking at each other like surgeons, daring the other to go first, I finally asked how long she thought it would last. She said it didn’t matter how long, it just mattered that it was.

—all I wanted was for the pulling to stop. Pulling pulling pulling. It was pulling on my arms. Pulling on my eyes. Pulling on my lungs. Pulling on the sweat on the backs of my legs. Pulling at night, pulling all day, pulling not falling, not burning, not matter, what does pulling matter? ‘It’s only love’, he would say, laughing, opening my clothes.

How soft and gentle her name sounds when I whisper it. It lingers on the tongue, insidious and slow, almost like poison, which is apt indeed. It passes from the tongue to the parched lips, and from the lips back to the heart.