I saw you last night

I was at the coffee shops looking for this book I just took back from a friend who refused to read it because I asked her to, and I couldn't find it. Instead, I saw you. You were in a corner table with this nice workaday girl in heels and make-up and it was like a whiff of breeze blew in my face. I saw the You I never knew. You looked all your years, and you looked easy, almost happy: a hair and two loosed about your face and weren't you laughing! I said how good must you be going around these days, surely you didn't miss me, maybe didn't even think of me. Then I started telling myself that that woman you were with isn't half as good as me and can't hurt you as much.

I stood there a good while just staring at you until another customer elbowed me. I picked my way out of the coffee bar.

Back in my room I thought of the last thing you told me. What did you ask? What it is that I wanted? Did I tell you what? I wanted to call. I told myself that when you are so happy like that, surely you wouldn't mind being called, being clawed at, even if I were a crow back from seven hells. I said I will call because you asked me not to bother you anymore and our relationship had always been set that way: you ask me one thing, I give you another thing.

But I was rather tired. I don't even know how to write now without being crazy and unclear. So I didn't do anything. Just set about to packing my things because I was supposed to go to the province, visit my Grandmother's grave. Then when I lay down in bed, I got so irritated with the water stains on the ceiling that I got up and started scraping them off, first with my fingers, then with a knife, until I started thinking about the cost of paint and Vulcasel and nails and everything that will glue things together. Then I thought about the cost of going home and seeing nephews and nieces and relatives who don't really care about grandmothers and one crazy relation.

At the day's end I settled for the cost of paint, because I said right now it's all that I have, this room and roof above my head, for there is nothing to have really, there is no You, there is no Grandmother even, no family, no friends to turn to. I had better keep it, the bed and the roof above my head or I won't feel right about so many things else. So there: I canceled most everything I wanted, kept to the economics of bare living, and now I feel done.

I am ever so done.

So here I am still in my room with the bareness of bare, preserving nothing and telling myself not to waste love, to not exhaust love, since love is done.