at first, there was the small architecture of authority.
a table. a microphone. the careful distribution of turns.
you had the questions. i had a draft.
you occupied one side of an arrangement i had no reason to question.
then something shifted.
not suddenly. nothing so convenient.
you spoke in long, almost uninterrupted sequences,
moving between ideas as though the distances between them were considerably smaller than anyone had supposed.
you drew connections between things i had never thought to place in the same room.
a theory grew another limb. an argument turned inside out.
you seemed delighted by the possibility of being wrong, provided the objection was sufficiently interesting.
i wanted to keep up.
more than that, i wanted to surprise you.
it would have been easier if you had been less attentive.
you could speak for an hour without coming to rest,
then lean across the table as though thought itself required proximity.
elbows planted. eyes fixed on mine.
the seriousness of someone listening for something that might alter what he thought he knew.
i leaned too.
a minor gravitational event.
no witnesses qualified to interpret it.
the city had begun to loosen around its edges.
smoke. the blue hour turning black.
somewhere, two people were trying to determine whether they were desired.
we made a subject of it.
the difficulty of knowing. the unreliable evidence. the small humiliations of getting it wrong.
you had theories about this too.
about hesitation, about the choreography of mutual uncertainty.
we spoke of them as one might speak of weather while standing in the rain.
i remember thinking there was something almost comic about our commitment to abstraction.
the subject was standing between us,
breathing.
you spoke of childhood, of the peculiar climate inside your head.
i offered pieces of mine.
we dismantled our ambitions and laid the parts out on the table.
you opened one door and then another.
i followed, carrying less of myself than you had offered.
you showed me where you had been hurt, almost casually,
and i had the sudden, indecent thought
that i wanted to know the geography of all of it.
the parts you had names for. the parts you didn\'t.
the precise location where confidence became tenderness.
i know the velocity of your speech.
i know how your face changes when you are listening.
i know the intimacy of an unfinished argument,
the way it can remain between two people long after they have stopped speaking.
i do not know the ordinary temperature of your body.
whether you sleep with your back to the wall.
whether you are cruel when you are tired.
whether you remember me as a woman
or simply as a conversation that went well.
you spoke of women you had wanted.
beautiful women.
you described them with an ease i could not reproduce in listening.
i wondered whether i belonged to the same category of possible things.
whether you had ever considered my mouth apart from the words that came out of it.
whether my body had entered your imagination at all.
or whether i had been permitted so far inside your confidence precisely because i was safely outside your desire.
i began to examine myself.
the body as a provisional object, something to be revised before its next submission.
i imagined arriving in another city less substantial.
the imagined removal of things you had never criticized.
the unspoken criteria of an evaluation i had invented.
how quickly admiration acquires the instruments of self-destruction.
and how absurd,
when only hours earlier i had felt so entirely at home in my own skin.
***
elsewhere, there is a love that has already survived the ordinary world.
a familiar warmth beside me in the dark.
a life that does not depend on the interpretation of a glance.
i know its tenderness.
i know the weight of being loved without having to wonder.
and still,
somewhere in those hours across the table,
i had begun to recognize an absence.
something i had been carrying so quietly i had almost mistaken it for part of myself.
you gave it a shape.
or perhaps i gave it yours.
i cannot say when the wanting changed.
when the pleasure of following your thoughts became the wish to interrupt them.
when your voice began to register somewhere other than my ears.
there was something obscene about the way you thought.
how you pulled an idea apart and held its living center between your fingers.
i wanted to disagree with you until neither of us could remember the argument.
wanted the violence of being understood too precisely.
wanted your intelligence to become an organ i could put my mouth against.
wanted—
but the sentence had nowhere legitimate to go.
somewhere between an argument and a confession
i began to want your silence.
not the absence of your voice, but the moment it might finally fail you.
i imagined asking something you could not answer.
imagined your face close enough to lose its expression.
your mouth no longer making
such beautiful use of words.
i wanted to discover what might interrupt that extraordinary mind.
what could make you forget the point you had been making.
what your hands might do when there was nothing left to explain.
we never touched.
this is the fact to which i keep returning.
the untouched skin becomes a kind of evidence.
i imagine the weight of you without knowing it.
the temperature of your neck. your breath changing when i move closer.
in one version you kiss me first.
in another i put my fingers against your mouth to make you stop talking.
you catch my wrist.
for a moment neither of us moves.
then your hand finds the back of my neck
and all that elaborate language
we had spent hours constructing
comes apart
against my lips.
i imagine how you would hesitate.
how i would recognize that hesitation and mistake it for permission.
how you might draw back just far enough to look at me,
as if there were still something to establish.
your knee almost touching mine.
your voice lower than before.
an unbearable accumulation of things that might be done.
and nothing happens.
the careful grammar of possible return.
another city. another room in which we are expected to behave like reasonable people.
no promises.
only enough language to keep the door from closing properly.
i have since considered every possible meaning.
now, at night, the evidence deteriorates.
i replay our conversations and discover new intentions in familiar sentences.
a hesitation becomes desire. a question becomes invitation.
i remember the serious way you looked at me when i was speaking.
then i remember you looking at my mouth.
i am no longer certain the second memory belongs to the first.
sometimes i allow the scene to continue.
the room empties.
you are explaining something i do not understand.
or perhaps i understand it perfectly and only want to hear you explain it again.
your voice has taken on a different texture.
i stop listening to the argument.
you notice.
for the first time all afternoon you lose your train of thought.
i imagine the small astonishment of your silence.
i would want to make you uncertain.
to feel the precise instant your composure gave way.
to press myself against the place where your certainty ended.
to find out whether your body could contradict your mind.
in another version we are outside again.
you are talking about the uncertainty of other people.
i ask whether you always speak so freely about desire and pleasure.
you laugh.
i cannot decide what you say next.
so i move closer.
i invent the rhythm of your breath.
the pressure of your hand at the small of my back.
the interval before a mouth becomes a mouth against another.
i imagine the first kiss as something tentative,
the second as something that has already lost interest in being careful.
***
none of this happened.
you did not touch me.
you did not ask to touch me.
there is no reason to believe you thought about my body at all.
and yet
and yet
i have begun to remember the pressure of your fingers.
the warmth of a neck i have never touched.
the way you might have said my name if there had been no one left to overhear.
i tell myself this will pass.
the body is excellent at forgetting.
desire exhausts its own inventions.
even the most elaborate theories eventually meet contradictory data.
but nothing contradicts an absence.
nothing disproves a possibility that has never been tested.
and lately something stranger.
i find myself thinking a thought and wondering how you would challenge it.
i begin an argument and hear the objection you might have made.
i answer you.
i change my mind.
sometimes i even make you laugh.
the conversation has continued without your knowledge.
***
tonight there is no message.
you are elsewhere, untouched by all of this,
perhaps asleep beside someone whose name i do not know.
i know the name of the one beside me.
i know the weight of the arm across my waist.
i should find comfort in the distance.
instead i have learned to use it.
each absence allows another invention.
each invention leaves a sensation.
i close my eyes and bring you closer than you have ever been.
this time you reach for me.
this time i let you.
your hand finds my waist with a familiarity it has not earned.
your mouth against my neck, then my ear,
and you say something i cannot quite hear.
i turn towards you.
you begin again.
a theory, perhaps. a confession.
something about what you had wanted all along.
i wake before the words arrive.
then spend the rest of the night
teaching you what to say.