We met on the way in sharing a private joke. I felt a pain like a live wire slamming through my chest. Holding hands, we move to part. I bring our clasped hands up. I kiss her hand while looking deep into her. Full of promise, full of longing.
She goes to her errand and I to mine. I enter the room, a small classroom. A single table with chairs around it. There are empty seats but not two together. I sweep my gaze across the people there. A few silently move a space down. One, a rival, mocks about something trivial. I barely hear it. My mind is too full.
She arrives and we are whole again. I ache when she is away, but don’t notice until she’s back and the pain is gone.
The teacher comes in. He runs down some test results. She did better than me. Not that I did poorly, she just cared more. There is an assignment to write on the board of a feeling or circumstance. It is a writing class.
Nervously in crabbed handwriting to small for the blackboard, I write a rhyming couplet about the smell in a small room, in the moments after sex. I’m writing the third line and am stumped. I ask her to read what I wrote.
It’s about her. It’s for her. She reads it, smiling. We are the only people here. She reads it out loud and corrects bits. Changes words and makes it better. She writes in the last line and it blows me away.
With her, I’m better. She collaborates with my art. I with hers. We share the same goal of creating beauty and create it apart and together. I am so fiercely proud of her. I reach out for her.
Then I wake. I’m alone. The room is empty. All I’m left with is this ache. And the hope, that she’s out there somewhere. Just woken, missing me as I miss her. We hope to find each other. We hope…
Pelgris 