16 May

I watched today..I thought she was dying. "My scissors," she calls for, and I cannot reply. I try to hand them to her without shaking fingers. She has to know, i think to myself, she has to know what i’ve been doing, what I want to be doing. She took the scissors, eyes flat and cloudy, like a pond where all the birds are dead, winter gripping the ice, turning it blue at the edges...she took them from me and held them aloft, higher than i thought she could reach today, reaching up and over herself over her gray hair over the dingy pillow and *SNIP* they went and down went she and gone were the blades. My breath caught, I could not speak. Suddenly, borne on energy from nowhere, she sat up, grasped my hand lying pale and shaking on the coverlet, and said, "Now, what have i left undone all this time?" She rose from the bed, put on her housecoat and proceeded mixing, crushing, sweeping, and singing. I sank, instead, to the tired mattress, dazed. I wish I knew how she...No. No. Too much knowledge,and I’ll be unable to hold it all. I’m so full as it is. Ever I go, back to him again...Am I cheating? Who’s more important to me? I sigh and fight this feeling. He is my dinner, dessert and all. I blush to say it so bluntly, but looking at him is opening myself to a world i cannot possibly swallow, i’m exploding with it, driven like a tide on the rocks. Crouching in that alcove, peering through the keyhole, I am more alive than any night in the sea, urchins under my skin, prickling my soul with their secrets.
Ah, dreamers, pretend you don’t see me tonight. I’ll try to fly over you quickly, catch him as he flings wide the door and stands in moonlight, skin to skin to --

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