I’m starting to get nervous.
You’re doing it again, giving me that look of yours. 7 years of pulling myself back together. And you just know where to knock and rattle my cage.
“We used to travel together,” I say when my boyfriend asks about the picture. “I think he’s teaching music somewhere in Singapore.” In the picture I looked like a washed out hippie and you had a scruffy beard. We both smelled of rain, gutter and sidewalk from all the nights sleeping at train stations. I look at that picture and practically could feel the grime underneath my shirt.
I wake up in the middle of the night sometimes thinking about you. My boyfriend sleeps peacefully beside me, his body brown and beautiful. His hair is cut closely cropped to his head, whereas yours springs wildly like a brushfire. I take my time in those nights to look out the window and pretend that we are looking at the same sky. I don’t know why I do that since I never did when we were together.
I do remember, one night in Venice, when we slept underneath the stars because the tent was too stuffy. You checked if I was awake, so I willed my eyes to not twitch or move. “Hey,” you nudged me, whispering. And then after a pause, “I love you.”
You said you loved me. The next day, we took out the tent and I gave you a moony smile to which you said, “What? Are you okay?” I never let in that I heard what you said. I wanted it to be a secret. We had an open relationship but your heart was mine, all mine to keep. That knowledge alone soared me to the highest level possible. I was in love with you all throughout Italy. In the middle of a busy street you’d turn to give me a smile and I said to myself, Yes, I love you too.
It never mattered to me that you didn’t say it out loud.
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