.passion du jour.

I miss you for some reason the way you laugh in a freefall eyes too brown lips too full words too god damn mother fucking kind and open arms like something out of stainedglass a mirage something finally correct after thousands of years a smile

kiss

I feel like I should be writing this drunk, that maybe my fingers could find the right keys better, that I could tap into some muscle memory I stumbled over drinking at 5 AM years ago but I am incredibly sober, and I have been now for several days, I go do the things I have to do and I wake up on time, and I even have lunchmeat in the fridge but I still might be able to get it across because I think you know the heavy and unbearable weight, I think you know the middles lifted out of the days I think you know the wasteland and the way they pick the meat off of scavengers, I think you remember the lips and eyes and hips of long gone lovers and the feeling of being locked out on your back in your room when the pages of the books that once made you feel strong, feel thin and weak between desperate fingers and it’s enough to stop your heart right in its tracks, it’s enough to make you run your palm along the plastic of the phone remembering the overload of a kiss at 19 and sparks floating down from the sky somehow on some major holiday

and you feel ok,

you’ve won my mind without much effort

and when I see you, I know you know what you’ve done

and I don’t mind it because I can push the heartache away

it’s a trick I know

and when the trick fails,

on nights like tonight,

I’ll sit in front of a blank page and try to put words together, build someting to bridge the distance between us,

I know it won’t

I found out why after I’d been working there, oh, about a month. My period started suddenly, as it sometimes does, and I asked to excuse myself to go to the ladies’ room. He wanted to know why. I told him.

He started ranting about how lazy women were. How we wasted time. How we were so careless and unhygenic, and that there was no call for that. He finished by telling me that I certainly was NOT going to the ladies’ room and that I was just going to sit there and work. He finished this off with a decisive nod, as if I’d just been told and there could be no possible argument.

“If I don’t go,” I said in an overly patient tone, “the blood is going to soak through my pants, stain my new skirt that I just bought, and possibly get on this chair I’m sitting in. I need something to soak up the blood. That’s why I need to go to the bathroom.”

His face turned oatmeal-gray; an expression of pure horror spread across his face. He leaned forward and whispered, “Wait, you mean that if you don’t go, you’ll just keep on bleeding? I thought that women could turn it off any time that they wanted!”

I thought,  You have got to be kidding.

Several horrified whispers later, I learned that he wasn’t. He actually thought a) that women could shut down the menstrual cycle at will, b) that we essentially picked a week per month to spend more time in the bathroom, i.e. to goof off, and c) that napkins and tampons were sex toys paid for by Health and Human Services. I didn’t know the term then, but he believed that tampons were dildos. Which was why he and a good number of his friends considered them luxuries.