The rain had ceased before you ever saw it. The clouds were low; you dodged puddles that reflected the grey of sky and black of pavement. You wondered if you had better grab a coat, but thought that to turn back home might risk your never leaving. You kept walking, already a few minutes late, unsure of what you’d find. She was on the street, waving, right when you were wondering whether to call for her, for her to awkwardly descend the stairs as you both swallow your nerves. But no, not awkward, she hugged you in the time it takes to worry, and you were caressing her shoulder blades, feeling the pressure of her warm sweater, before you could worry again of what you ought to do.

Her questions were as quick as her footsteps, and you were on your way at approximately the same moment that you felt grateful her pictures did her no justice. On the walk to the park you felt relieved that at its worst, the date wouldn’t have enough chemistry. But words left her lips in a fast enough tide for your spirits to lift and a budding admiration to raise your need to impress her. Competing with her midterm paper, you grew concerned that your time together was nearing its end. When she told her (many) stories, she would carry herself forward with gestures, laughter and impressionistic voices. You couldn’t help but smile–sweetly, she said.

Her affable demeanor meant that she had made a mistake, and that your responsibility was to now be as calming to her nerves as possible, so calm that you would forget your own little tremoring trembling anxieties, in order to con this beautiful spirit: fit for a stage or a thousand doters, not your lonesome tea for two. This shaking force of freedom would freeze, would look at you with the total patience of someone who does not yet understand, every time you spoke. So, each time you stopped her riotous laughter for your own selfish thoughts, you had better be clever enough to keep the ball rolling. Thankfully, a few faltering failures did not discourage the following remarks that worked–actually worked. When you finally managed to crack her code, and she rocked so her back left the park bench, you couldn’t help your own chuckle, laughing because you were relieved to have made her laugh, which made her laugh even harder, relieved to see you laugh.

Hard to believe that a few hours prior you had expected a casual conversation and nothing more before the dimming of the candle. But by now you had come to know her face, her voice, and the way that she would lean over and nudge you with her arm, would rest her head on your shoulder every so often. Perhaps planned moves, perhaps the playful accident of a laugh too strong to be controlled–you knew only that you ought to be grateful for even these glancing touches. She kept her eyes away, facing short, stout trees at the start of an autumn amber, with blisters of cherry red. Every now and then, you turned away from her to cough (still recovering from a rather nasty cold), and imagined her taking the opportunity, with the sentry sent away, her eyes at your back.

A few hours earlier and you were fretting how to explain to a sweet and teary girl that “love” was a four letter word hardly sufficient for explaining the complexities of human attachment, that jealousy was an obstacle to the peace of human souls, the result of a collective miseducation. And now you spent each exhalation hoping that she might turn again to face you, to fully reveal what you had been seeing–for the most part–as an incomplete side-profile. Strange that the moments when her face was a full gestalt–the triangular temple of cheeks, nose, eyes, then a smirk that she had caught you looking–could have such a profound effect on you, and yet your memory would fail each time she looked away. We never get enough time to see our loved ones clearly. The pictures had done her no justice. It was at this point that you began to suspect that “love” was a word you’d have to utter to prevent her from leaving, and you began to imagine under what circumstances you might be permitted by common courtesy and even your own conscience to release the word.

How silly you are. Or how silly you were, just a few hours ago? All you can offer in times like these is your honesty, though honesty hardly suffices for an answer. What-is and what-will-be are not next-door neighbors, but reside under the same roof. You think of the ineffable trace of time, the trace of her face as she looks at you, a professor who said it’s an inexplicable sentence: “the day I met my wife.”

Her eyes get pulled repeatedly to her phone, and you think of her paper at home, or any number of a possible caller. You can see the quickening pace of her heart in how frequently she checks her phone. Modesty is a masochism; it asserts itself in times when inflicting pain on oneself is necessary for the other’s good. “I know it’s getting late; did you need to leave for your paper?” And just as you were ready to let her go, she apologized, said she had plenty of time, and placed her phone in her purse. You began to notice her energetic tics, her averted gaze, and grew hopeful that she might like you enough to be nervous, might like you enough, too, to let you quell her nervous heart as she lights yours aflame.

Perhaps you could have stayed long enough, in that unknown spot where only strangers passed, long enough enough to watch the yellowing leaves turn brown and green again, but the lamps turned on and the coat of night began to color everything black. Perhaps you did spend seasons, sitting together, because the thoughts you had before her were becoming ever-more difficult to remember.

Your stomaches and bladders had been calling for over an hour now, begging you both to leave; but, you collaborated, schemed, so you could find an Italian place with noodles and not have to part. Your urge to hold her hand was hardly sensible, but your saving grace was how often she would lean on you while laughing. At times, language seemed a secret invention you had concocted together, in clever rebellion against the drones of history; at others, it was an inherited force carrying you onward, to a destination that you imagined a long cycle of ancestors have found, where you would repeat the same words and promises as have centuries of lonely heart seekers before you. Oh, to be again in the daze of a possible infinity, those days which are far too few.

At the time when beds were calling, and conversation could not continue; you had decided not to accompany each other’s sleep. Your lips gathered, as did her hand upon you, then finally you left.

The next day you found her again; or, rather, she found you, in your home. In the day’s fading remnants, we huddled under the warm, dimly-orange glow of the lamp, like the afternoon sun which cast larger-than-life shadows about the room, on the wall past the bed. The touches multiply sporadically like the nebulous desires–the daydreaming “what ifs” one had long ago learned not to dream–and yet each touch seemed to assure that each dream, each desire was a mere not-yet but still promised here, here as the presence of hand on flesh. Her face was golden–haloed by the lamp–and the soft “o” of her lips eclipsed those of other lovers sometime ago; the flashing heat of her presence overcast any afterimages, seemed to assure that this was real.

But before the tides of sleep could wrap together more touching promises of times to come; tears appeared. She cried, silently, for reasons she could not say. Secrecy built walls that you had imagined broken; you grew uncertain of yourself, unworthy as you were to hear the words of her hurt. You walked her home knowing that something was wrong but that she would not say; as if walking alongside the river, so her movements seemed alien and indifferent, though traveling the same direction. She could not stop, so you waved goodbye.

The apologies soon came and you were left to wonder if you had truly offered a pleasure too strong to be withstood. Surely, you must have caused pain to be so exiled. But, without the grace of a crime, you were a wanderer unsure if, anywhere, you would be worthy of home. A curious condition when you are both malady and medicine; your wish to be a comforting presence is inflected, always, with the poison of your care. Alone, with the watchful, unblinking owls of night, you have power over naught but words. And in a time when your own ears hunger, you must offer the inadequate food of your own comforting words; your cannibalized feeds on its own flesh. Strange, too, that you must write yourself into a play where your accompanying performer is also the audience and critic; any script will fail for the mere fact that two authors are required to create anything worth more than a monologue. How frustrating to be in the presence of limp puppets who will do no more than criticize the show for its inauthentic ventriloquy.

You find yourself, thus, a certain fool with an undetermined stupidity; you would pay a hefty price to know your error. And yet the awful truth may yet be that no wrong was committed, so no apology could grant your forgiveness.

You want, in words, your feelings to take the form, like curves gripping space, fingers reaching, grasping. The flexing, curling, twisting and twitching of muscle–the pain you take–to take the form, beautiful. Or with what well-wrought cunning of tongue could you pull her return? But you wonder now whether the desired embrace, these intertwining lines of elaborate ornament, might not be a violence, a tear at the skin, your own words and flesh nothing more than malleable iron filaments, twisted into the barbed, helix wires of a gate imprisoning. Yourself torn by lattice, tangled into net as when lame-footed invention finally caught up with love and war.

The blank space at the end of the page does not appear nearly so encouraging as it once did, when your own pages were much lighter, not yet leadened of ink. Hard to think that there where times when the glow of empty space was as promising as the rising sun. Hard to imagine what use could ever be made of words. Nothing could ever change what it is to feel, and yet the blank space at the end of this page hurts to leave alone, unforgiven. You can save yourself the misery of further writing with the self-delivered promise, only, that—

Time devours both heart and hurt.