The tea leaves spell my future as they stir uneasily in the depths of my mug as I sip gingerly. I don’t mind the temperature. It reminds me of the easy, languid heat of a boy-man’s mouth.
I have not forgotten the leftover desire our bodies left in the rumpled up sheets that we’d slept in together. It lingers, even though he’s been gone a while. He left to go back to his corner of the country with my name twirling and bouncing off the walls in his mind, leaving chaotic cracks and destructive dents in what he thought he had already figured out. Although my name remains in his thoughts, it dare not be on his lips.
This is the alternative life where I say yes. Where I have to not let my voice grow cold on the telephone that connects us like an umbilical cord, even when it hurts to love. Here, my flesh still remains over fat over ribs that hold my lungs. As I saw him depart in the dusk of that chilly Monday evening, those lungs were stepped on, ribs cracking as I wept for love.