She sometimes looks skinner to me, almost like a thinner and her hair is more blond and her eyes are more blue. She sometimes has dark skin and eyebrows that she worries about. She is a transformer and all I can think about is the fact that I am not and I need to hide things. I will hide all the wine bottles and all the garbage and plastic bags and make myself charming. My arms are so firm and unchanging; my smile is crooked from years of pulling themselves sideways over broken teeth. I am not.
She snores a bit, enough for me to keep ear plugs in the cubby holes at the base of my reading lamp. I roll them in my fingers and plug the reciprocal of my pillow ear. She moves through me like bass and my mother driving the car to put me to sleep.
The raspberry bush grows and grows and screams in the sunlight over the back fence, all that fruit to pluck all that sticker to kill.
She talks a bit too much when I am trying to listen to the radio, she talks a bit too much when I am catching the news. I have never said anything to her, I never could, because I have never had it this good.
At work, I imagine her jean lines and me sliding my hands along them as if I was a cartographer as if she was a map and the topography of her skin is all that matters.
She makes me good dinners, and she is the quiet in all my storm. She is on the boat with me in Friday Harbor, Chris and I are pulling up the anchor, the kelp and saltwater dripping down our arms and legs, Gavin is asking questions and learning fire, my father is backing up Cygnet, I imagine all the things under the hull and I see all the things above… I take a breath.
She pushes with her right hand against my left shoulder, against the drywall behind my back that doesn’t matter. You should have seen it spread like waves and ripples down the walls, it blew up my bed and turned off my TV… of course at first I didn’t accept it, I tried to reconnect to the internet and call up all my friends and watch sunsets just the same but nothing made sense anymore.
She makes me want to draw, she makes me want to write and paint, she makes me want to catch this. Sometimes she is skinny and blond with blue eyes, other times she is in the light of the computer screen with a pair of tweezers. When I see her, when I am with her there is only one goal and that is to create.
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