nothing contradicts an absence

at first, there was the architecture of authority.

a table. a microphone. the careful distribution of turns.

you had the questions. i had a draft.

i had no reason to question this arrangement.

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 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 you thought you 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 unreliable evidence. the small humiliations of getting it wrong.

you had theories about this too.

we spoke of them as one might speak of weather while already soaked to the skin.

the subject was standing between us,

breathing.

 

there was no discernible order to the things we made available.

a theory of power.

the private arrangements of a life.

the things a person learns

to want, 

to fear,

to conceal.

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 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 exact 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,

how 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.

or whether i had been permitted so far inside your confidence precisely because i was safely outside your desire.

 

without a verdict, i began the revisions.

my body as a provisional object, something to be edited before its next submission.

i imagined arriving in another city less substantial.

the unspoken criteria of an evaluation i had invented.

how quickly admiration acquires the instruments of self-destruction.

you had not found me lacking.

i did that part myself.

 

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 had done nothing.

i was beginning to rehearse this fact with the insistence of someone preparing a defense.

i could account for every minute. the absence of touch.

less easily for what i had wanted those minutes to contain.

 

i cannot say when the wanting changed.

when the pleasure of following your thoughts became the wish to interrupt them.

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.

what your hands might do when there was nothing left to explain.

 

we never touched.

this is the fact to which i keep returning.

i imagine the weight of you without knowing it.

the temperature of your neck. the heartbeat beneath your jaw.

in the version where i am brave i put my fingers against your mouth to make you stop talking.

you catch my wrist. your thumb rests against my pulse.

for once, you seem unable to decide what comes next.

i watch you swallow.

i want you to cross the distance so that afterward i can say the initiative had not been mine.

 

so you do.

 

and all that elaborate language 

we had spent hours constructing 

comes apart 

against my lips.

 

the first kiss is tentative,

the second has already lost interest in being careful.

 

you look at me as though something has finally escaped your understanding. 

and for one terrible instant 

i want to know how much further i could make you forget yourself.

 

***

 

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 could survive your indifference.

it is your wanting me that would require an answer.

 

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.

i want to make you uncertain.

to feel the 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.

 

it can. 

you begin a sentence and it will not finish.

your breath catches in the middle of a word.

i take my time. i do not help you.

your hands find me like something you had been refusing to read.

your mouth at my throat, unhurried and then not.

you say my name like a concession.

and i like that more than i should.

 

***

 

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.

i have invented even your restraint.

 

and yet

and yet

i have begun to remember the pressure of your fingers.

the heat of a body i have never felt.

the way you might have said my name if there had been no one left to overhear.

 

i tell myself this will pass.

the mind is excellent at forgetting.

desire exhausts its own inventions.

even the most elaborate theories eventually meet contradictory data.

but nothing contradicts an absence.

 

and lately something stranger.

i find myself having 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.

sometimes your imagined objections disappoint me. i revise them.

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.

it tightens in sleep.

and i lie perfectly still.

 

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.