Not mine

I made dinner, which is a foolish habit I have of doing far too early on. And yet I can’t help myself, using cooking as metaphor to convey competence, history, my ease in my own home. I feed the people I care about, I always have, with thai green curries or homemade gnocchi and the tales of my past.

We started all these stories then would get off track in the way you do when there is no history to lean on. A question about favourite sports turns into a story about your sister getting sick at your wedding, turns into a detour into your childhood scars and before you know it we forget we were talking about yoga at all.

But that didn’t matter like nothing mattered that early summer except for baring our souls as quickly and irreversibly as possible. We’d have time to circle back to yoga, we reasoned, silently, individually. When we were done being impressive and broken and magnificent.

The red wine and the beers and the slight summer breeze flirting with my grey, flimsy curtains tricked us into thinking we might be onto something special, unignorable; despite irrefutable evidence to the contrary.

But it was to end before it really got started, and I hadn’t the energy to be surprised. He was exactly what I didn’t need, but wanted all the same. Broken, half-grown, in need of fixing. In awe of my lucidity, beautiful in his weakness.

Not mine.