How about that story where the girl is in love with the guy, and has been for a long time, and he's basically her best friend except that they sleep together? Also it gets more complicated, but there's no real reason to go into that. It's complicated in the way everyone's lives are complicated, with divorces and kids and friends who don't know and damaged hearts and things that haven't been worked through yet and drinking problems and money problems and communication problems.

But in that story, which you already know because we all already know it, the girl is in love with the boy. The boy loves the girl but he isn't IN LOVE with her, for whatever reason, maybe because it's the wrong time or he's not over his ex or she's not the right girl. It doesn't matter. He's not cruel. He doesn't want anything to change because he likes it the way it is, the closeness and the friendship and even sometimes the sex. She likes it too. The sad part is that she likes it in a way that makes her feel like the only right and natural thing would be if he looked at her the way he used to look at his ex, which is also the way the girl looks at him. He avoids her eyes sometimes. The sad part is that she can feel in her little red fluttery meat heart how right it would be if they ate together, paid the mortgage together, slept together every night, were THAT THING for each other.

The sad part is that she knows she should cut it short, should walk away from the eyes that don't look at her that way and the hands that don't touch her that way, but she won't, because she loves him and she hopes that someday he will love her too, that way.

if I'm with you long enough
to whet our wills as we grow old
could you let me close
to breathe your breath
to touch your soul?
--Deb Talan

So hey

I met this guy. I wasn't sure at first, but he turned out to be totally fucking AWESOME. Smart as hell in a warped way, has kids himself, hits my wavelength. He gets everything, and the sex is fucking amazing. He's the second man I've been able to orgasm with in my life, and it's not for lack of sampling.

At first it was mostly a drunk-booty-call situation but then we started hanging out, and then we started hanging out more, and gradually he grew into a position in life as my best friend, and I realized one day that I was completely, shit-faced, fucked-up, ass-over tits in love with him. The only problem with this is that I'm married, and he's married-but-separated for the last year and a half.

It's been about eleven months since I met him. For most of the time I've been extremely diligent about squashing any ideas that deviate from the obvious option of friends-with-benefits, although deviant ideas have grown more invasive the longer I know him.

A month ago my husband declared, for maybe the 15th to 20th time, that he wants a divorce, and this time I realized that there is no way, no way even though I try and I compromise and I give him what he asks for as well as is within my capacity, that we can stop this cycle of coercion and threats and abandonment, so I decided to give it to him. Now he lives on my couch, and the love I have for my friend no longer has a compelling reason to be stopped pressing at my mind and my heart. There it is, ever present, ever dominating.

I have been in love before. Three times. The second time nearly killed me, and still, in retrospect, I don't know how or why I let myself fall in love a third time. This fourth time baffles me, it defies me. It is the hope that kills, it is the cynical laugh, it is the swerve that carries a carload of kids over the railing of a bridge.

The death of the third love has been a long, slow, lingering cancer. It is the memory of the regret of a long-ago deed. It is as real as the dying great-aunt I never write to. It is the last sorrow before sunrise, or the first one before sunset.

This which I feel for my friend, though; this guy... if I wrote it all down it would seem perfect, on paper. On paper, it is perfect, I suppose, except for this one thing; that he isn't in love with me. Perhaps he is still in love with his estranged wife, or perhaps he's just not recovered enough for love. Either way, he is blameless. I let myself into it. I walked in, open-eyed, open-handed, legs open.

I can't stay here. The multiple rejection is killing me, quickly and slowly at the same time, every day a thousand deaths, as they say. I know he cares about me, and that makes it harder and more tempting to stay, to hang around him, to sleep near him, to bring his body into mine in the hope that somehow, through intimate contact, he will start to feel what I feel. I could become that girl.

I won't become that girl. I won't be pitiful. I will ride my own destiny and not linger hoping for his heart to intersect mine. I will not look into his eyes and see again the absence of what my throat and belly and cunt ache to see.

I will keep putting my body under other men, until the imprint of his is obliterated.

I don't have anything else to say

I forgot how to write poetry a long time ago. Sometimes I eat the remnants, to remind me of the unreasonable heart that beats in my reasonable chest.