Lost and Unfound, Floating in (Cyber) Space: "There Was a Time, I Need Not a Name"

I. 

Sixty-eight degrees of separation

between us.

The warm balm of May has given sway

to the icy,

isolated showers

of late November.

His eye has grown weary

of the same unobstructed sight.

A chilled window pane reflects a

still cooler bed—

and two bodies

drift apart,

finding the struggle a bitter challenge

upon oceans of pima sheets and discovering

solitary warmth preferable

to a belabored embrace

(which inevitably ends with two

too annoyed by the sticky cling)

and disdainfully, painfully

shoving themselves apart where,

on a broken floe,

bilious,

we drift in two directions

across the artic white vast.

I breath a sigh…actual relief—

To shiver and smile

and find

my own warmth

in the folds of deep down,

scarcely regretting favoring

the caress of cold white cotton

to the synthetic touch of toxic familiarity.

I pray the swift return of numbing sleep

to forget for another hour,

at least,

how truly cold a bed can feel—

When broken only

by sixty-eight degrees of separation.

 

II.

We were not always this way,

says the cliché.

But I have begun to believe that maybe

we were this way always.

You, rigid, intolerant and arrogant—unearned and

undeserved

 

self-assurance and a sense of

entitlement.

Me, too young and too foolish,

 

not of mind—

but of spirit—

too quick to trade her sex and self-respect for a

(false)

sense of belonging and place.

 

If only we had pressboard props of

your overbearing mother

and my ever-absent father

to bear false witness to the absurd and unholy union

we two have forged, perhaps,

we could bid a formal farewell,

take a bow, and drop

the curtain on this tragic comedy of the grotesque

before we become the thing we are together,

apart.

You are not bad.

I am not bad.

But, together,

 

we are rot, but not

the kind that you can cut away on a piece of fruit,

leaving wounded but tender, healthy flesh behind

with only a scar or a gaping wound to mark the memory

of black

and bruise.

No, we two are rot like an amalgam

of forgotten,

ugly, unwanted vegetables

left stinking

at the bottom of a refrigerator,

spoiling and melting into an indiscernible soup

of filthy,

 

rancid

 

rot.

 

III.

Stagnation.

We travel in familiar circles because they are

just that:

familiar.

The known has been

all too well revealed between us,

and time spent without mystery

 

is just that:

time spent.

Only there is no change back.

There is no receipt for refund.

There is no warranty for what is broken.

And there is certainly nothing

to show

for the time we have invested.

Together, we face the

Bankruptcy

of a lifetime

spent venturing

 

everything

without gain.