Read Me

I have a lot of time on my hands. Sometimes i sit idle for years. Somebody put long painful months into making me what i am. They labored over every minute detail; worried intensely over every tiny part of me. I collect dust and watch everyone pass by, so hurried, so busy with living. Do they know what i have inside me? Maybe they dont know that im desperate to be held. Theyre too involved with the passing time and the things to get done. But i could help them catch their breath. I could donate a lovely moment to make them take pause. I will gladly trade a sliver of time and tale for the trace of your fingers along my edges. I am brimming with a story i so long to whisper in your ear. I have landscapes and treasures and love affairs to share with you. Please pick me up! Let me rest in your lap while you nap for a spell. Place me beside your bed to stand sentry while you dream. Press your favorite flowers inside me. Love me for what i withhold. Then secret my trove of wonder behind a cupped hand to anothers ear. Please give me to a friend.

I've long been told that timing was everything. Yet somehow my timing in love and life in general really was always a bit off; always attuned to some unknown rhythm that I seemingly had no control over.  My life glanced from one city to the next constantly affixed to the path of another person not suited to me in the least. Somehow after twelve long years I inexplicably mustered the courage to bow out of my undesirable romantic situation.  All the while a boy that I had a brief lip-locked evening with in junior high was untangling himself from a similar scenario. 
Many long years and too many never-ending lonely nights later this boy, now a man, found his way back into my life.  I had long given up on the idea of marital bliss since I had seen more marriages wither than thrive.  I had even grown pretty comfortable with the idea that marriage and monogamy and co-habitating intimately with another human being was clearly unnatural.  These antiquated notions were obviously for the few sad souls left that hadn't heard the news that wedded bliss was an impossibility and an over-romanticized misrepresented falsehood.  Yet underneath my shellac of jaded cynicism there was a sliver of wonder and a sense of adventure that could not be snuffed out by bad experience.  Timing had plans for placing me and a boy in the most unlikely of places at the exact same time. And that is how two of the greenest eyes I've ever seen locked me in when I wasn't expecting it....and I was fourteen again.  And there's nothing in the world more scary and intimidating than jumping into something you don't fully understand. And giving yourself over to something so far off the charts from what you had planned, but man, it is exciting!  I can't wait to get lip-locked with this green-eyed prince every day til the end of the end.

There was gossip about her. A whispered reputation that outshone her quiet nature and her shyness.  I didnt believe it. She and i had a common shame that made my opinion more generous than others.  I wanted so badly to ask her if hed done the same thing to her. How did she get through? Was there even a 'getting through'?  I wanted to steal peaks at her in the mirror to see if you could tell by looking. I should have wanted to befriend her. But i was sickened by the idea that someone within arms reach had been disgraced the same way as me. I was disgusted at the thought that we had a common miserly thread that if spoken of might always bind us together in our sorrow and i didnt want to share that thin spindle of horror with anyone or speak of it out loud because then it must have really happened. She and i were in the same dejected heap by no fault of our own. Each floating in our own seperate brine of humiliation.