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He looked away. He bit his lip. And when he kissed me, it was entirely without feeling, sadly sweet or otherwise. If he had been Adam, or Nicholas, or one of the men who walked past me every day, or a coworker, or a poet, or a dreamer, he might have smiled slightly and brushed away my tears. He might have searched me wordlessly; he might have appraised me softly and unfalteringly with his fathomless eyes. He might have kissed my eyelids and murmured, "In another life, this will happen again. I will find you again." But he was none of those things. He wasn't that kind of a person. I often tried to write down the feeling I got when I held o

I think it's time I told you the truth. Sometimes, I don't see you as a person, but only as fragments thereof. My vision kaleidoscopes and you shatter and refract. I see the grey in your hair or the falter in your step, or the curve of your mouth as your lips form my name. Watch closely.   Dearest, I am. I do. I am. I do try to be better for you. When the little fluorescent numbers blink away another hour, another night, I feel you in my blood compelling perfection, urging improvement. When my breath catches and my legs burn, when my eyes are tired and my thoughts sluggish, you're there. You create me and destroy me.

I want to walk with you in the failing autumn sunlight. I want to know your middle name, your mother's name, all of the schools you attended, what your marks were, what subjects you liked best, who was your first kiss, your first fuck, your first love, the worst thing that ever happened to you, the best. I want to learn your secrets like a new language and drink up your hidden self.

The city skyline broke abruptly, a pause in the stylized architecture and art deco, making way for cathedral spires. Wide, elaborate doors led to the vaulted interior and row after row of unadorned pews. A woman's eyes swept the rows and the ceiling, the holy man at the altar, the confessional booth, the burning incense and the tiny candle flames beneath stained glass. Mass already in session, she bowed her head and moved quietly into the labyrinth of pews alongside her equally noiseless escort. They shuffled into a sparsely populated isle and sat, the faithless alongside the devout in the sacred House of God. "Consider it all joy, my breth

"Well, it's been nice seeing you. I'll just drop you off, then," you spat sarcastically. I didn't answer; just smiled down at my seventy-dollar boots without even the slightest trace of remorse.

I was glad to get his letter; glad to read the scathing remarks, glad to note the wobbly lettering halfway through denoting his hands shaking with rage when he'd penned it, glad to see I'd made my mark. I knew he'd think of me in the early evening hours and when he made his afternoon tea, knew he'd spill halfway through pouring when he thought of me with a steaming cup pressed to my lips. It was his rage that bespoke a love gone sour, and his hatred that convinced me he'd cared.

"I am everything," my neck reads, inscribed in Latin beneath a globe and a compass. I had them inked when I was seventeen as a favor from a friend. "Ego sum panton," I instructed him, printing the words carefully on a scrap of paper I'd produced from a jacket pocket. Recalling horror stories of tattoos gone wrong, I mercilessly pestered him throughout the procedure, forcing him to spell it back to me. In hindsight, I could've left it well enough alone after the initial inscription considering it was a fairly simple phrase, not to mention Derek, my tattoo artist friend, had taken two semesters of Latin in his community college days. "I got i

It was a cold morning or a sunny afternoon on a bus or a subway. The passengers were quiet, or loud as they laughed and joked. I boarded wordlessly, paying the fare to the driver or at the turnstile, and she followed. The rattling along the tracks (the wheels bumping over potholes) drowned out every attempt at conversation, so I just stood and held one of the silver poles. She sat in the last seat available beside me. In a lull, I called out to her. "I can't get used to it," I said. She grinned and looked away, her princess curls falling in her face. The long metal deathtrap rattled and shook. "Really," I tried again, "Why did you do