Thoughts from a Thinking Girl

I’d have told you that I spread honey, then sprinkled cumin and the lightest dusting of cinnamon and chili oil on cod filets tonight. To finish, I squeezed fresh limes instead of lemon. The kitchen smelled like your fingers after you made me come describing our scents.

And that I came again, but it wasn’t the same.

 

And that knowing I’ll never smell like you-mixed-with-me again is almost unbearable.

 

And that I should have kept your plaid shirt, the one you said made me so fuckable, just so I could have something with our smell on it, even though the smell would fade.

 
Even if I look like shit in plaid.

 

I’d wear it until our scent faded to nothing and all I would have is another men’s button-down shirt in my closet that conveys nothing satisfying – a memory that no longer holds a memory.

 
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I’d have told you that we finished planting the raised bed

 
How we had exactly the right amount of plants and seeds to fill out 40 square feet

 
How my shoulders still feel the strain of shoveling dirt

 
How paltry the tiny little plants look in their new bed

 
How vulnerable all young sprouted beings are when placed in a new bed

 
Like you and I were,

 
for the first time

 
and even the second.
 
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I’d have told you that I understand: you and I weren’t meant to become a garden.

 
We weren’t meant to comingle our roots, embed ourselves deeply in fresh new soil, reap a late summer harvest.

 
No, you and I were a spring bouquet, herbs and blooms wrapped amid tiny tendrils of sweat pea vines, emitting an enticing aroma, earthly sage and warm spices, honey and lime, your salt, my sweet.

 
Like all bouquets, we were to be savored and enjoyed until the fade.
 

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I’d have told you that I’m fighting the fade.

 

That I’ve re-read our farewell emails dozens of times.

 

That I’m still obsessively checking for more.

 

That I know you won’t contact me, even if you want to, because I asked you not to, so I could begin to wean myself off of you.

 

That I still believe you when you said you will love me, always.

 

That you loving me and returning to the one you loved before me, well, that . . .

 

that . . .

 

that pain weakened my knees and left me sobbing in the bathroom, the kitchen, the car.

 

That your love, lasting less than two full moon cycles, is harder to lose than the decade of love I held with the one who, endless moon cycles later, still blames me for his pain.

 

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Oh, loves that last the briefest of times are the purest.
 

Once I loved a man I met at a stop sign on a bike path. My husband and I were biking along the beach in Venice, CA, and this older, gray-haired man biked right up next to me. His eyes were bright; he was spry and light on his bike. We began talking like we’d biked and talked for a lifetime. Like it was just him and me. He never looked at my husband, whose bike was inches from mine. I had the sense that I could bike behind this other man and never look back. That I’d end up home, in the home I was supposed to dwell in but somehow didn’t.

 

I rode along the waterfront path with my husband, silence looming between us. I never told him of my momentary unfaithfulness, the way I left him completely for the stranger whose eyes were new and shining, whose voice was a new song, whose spry and light body held the promise of something untasted yet already known.

 

If we could have spoken tonight, I’d have told you this Venice Beach story, of how I fell in love with a man who biked up next to me, and that it was one of the purest, most fulfilling loves I’ve experienced, even though it ended when the light turned green and he stood atop his pedals, established his balance, and biked away. I loved him from the moment he was beside me to the moment my eyes lost the vision of him. I ached for the spot that opened in me where that love bloomed.

 

I never saw him again.
 

Until I saw you.