You would think it would be in the corners of lips that are no longer in use, you know. Right around the curve where the edges of other lips are supposed to meet. They hide in the backgrounds of your eyes, that reflection you can see if you lean in real close to the mirror and focus on the image that’s watching itself. Maybe they tingle your skin where hands or other skin or lips had been. Where they had lingered, and kissed a shoulder probably with as much delicacy as they could possibly muster. That you watched, as those kisses got lower and lower, further away from your shoulder, but you could still feel it everywhere. You gotta think that touches like that don’t just disappear.

That this broken heart you hold could be glued and taped, but come on it’ll never be right again. And if you think that all broken hearts want to embrace each other in the moonlight and tell stories, then you’re seriously depraved. But still.

You wonder if carnal licks lasts, drip down your imagination like milky molasses. If everything on the inside can feel just as good as the outside. And maybe look just as good too, so much so that you don’t refrain from asking for the camera to sit on the desk next to the bed next time. You finally got pass the fear of your mother finding the recording on there one day.

You hope that wasn’t too bold or not bold enough or not hard enough or too long or not long enough or if you should’ve turned the lights off first or if bras are like some secret cockblock invention or if you should smile right know, not knowing if smiling would make you like it more or just nervous.

You hope that you’re not going to be alone afterwards filling in the spaces that were previously occupied with a longing for eye contact, for whispers, for laughs, for anything but dead silence, for less light because you probably look crazy with your hair all messed up now, for satisfaction or at least the acknowledgement that you weren’t satisfied.

A heart is a stupid fragile thing anyways. Bodies break all the time and they’re put back together. Bodies heave and hurt, are forced and pulled and pushed. But no one gives a damn about the exterior. The second your heart does it though, everything ends.

Take this one and try to fix it.

Take this one and try desperately to re-adhere the love.

Then put it back in your body and try to reconnect everything.

Reconnect that time you were supposed to be listening and didn’t hear what was said so you asked for it to be repeated. Never was repeated, instead it snowballed into invective curses about how much you will never fucking listen. During which you stopped listening anyways and went back to the pointless assignment on your desk and the annoying pop-up on your lap-top.

Reconnect to the time you guys first met. And there was an immediate something. She was smiling. He was trying not to smile, but smile anyway. And now you’re both smiling like idiots. Your favorite song comes on and the only other person who knows every single word, even the awkward high riff in the chorus and sudden heavy beat bass drop and the face that the guy makes in the video just as he’s about to start the second verse, that person becomes your soul mate for the next three minutes. Then maybe three years. People watch in amazement, some who were there the day that song came on. Some who witnessed the music die in your relationship.

They always watch you don’t they. Wanting to know if everything is on the up and up or just about to crash and burn. Either way it’s entertainment.

Reconnect to the time you guys spent at that fancy Schezuan restaurant on Valentine’s Day because you couldn’t go and order regular Chinese food since that would’ve seemed cheap. It was crowded as hell and it took forever to get a table, then when the table was actually available you got to sit there for twenty minutes before anyone paid attention to you.

But passing the time with you, sitting and standing there secretly joking with each other about the hostess’s dim sum accent, was the stuff great love letters are written for.

Reconnect that time that a no was said and meant and wanted, but it wasn’t recognized or understood. That it hurt, and nothing was ever said.

Sometimes you try to find the ‘why’. Nothing was said. The Why nothing was said. The Why your body was broken and your heart imploding, but you said nothing.

When you think about it, his hands never really held yours the right way. You’re supposed to clasp them, individually holding one another. Not wanting to let go. Or she didn’t look into your gaze at the right moments. She was always off in her own head, staring out of the window and daydreaming about finding the cure for ultimate world suffering or some shit. When all you really wished was that she would look at you with a look like you mattered.

But all that was a few months to a lifetime ago, when you thought that it did matter.

 

It did, didn’t it?