The Ghost in You

Vanish and linger...

The Velcro-pull as you disappear...whether behind a door or from a room...I feel the stretch, the tug and the snap and even the scent of you remains behind so briefly that I can almost imagine you there if I just close my eyes.

You fill me like a vessel, your day-part in mine...the anticipation of the exact moment when the outline comes into view...I consume the shape of you...the space of you to pull into me and loiter...for just a bit.  Always...just a bit.

I'm not even sure what I would call the time in those moments...certainly not minutes although if I were to glance at my watch they'd be speeding by unusually quick. 

But at other moments there is stoppage...like that moment in an airplane when the decompression happens and you feel time moving against you reluctantly....

The wrenching in the departure though is always...always the same.  Every time. 

And I've been of course in such absence...where I can feel time like a glacier...barely discernable movements, but I'm sure it's moving...as a day becomes a week, and a month becomes a year.  The hours of empty portions...an unfilled vessel now dry and dust-filled...it is a memory filled patina...but it collides with the desire to build such new ones.

It is the can't.  It might be the won't. 

That is there...the door that will never quite open. 

And I hoard the moments like a sickness...gathering every piece, bits of broken porcelain....paper that is long yellowed and broken beads from jewelry that represented the shattered times we were together and then we were apart. 

I sit in a room filled with thoughts of bribes and money and how I can craft a scheme to re-capture you...how I can convince...coerce...cajole.

But it is a fruitless effort...a crack-pipe dream.  Which makes it really, really hard sometimes.

But occasionally, just sometimes...I can catch the ghost in you and I can see you still there.  I can almost feel you.  Almost.

The fingers of you upon me...wrapping tightly against a heart...filling your grasp as you squeeze the sweet memory of you out of me.