Cuddling on the Passengers Side
by Lea Moser http://daydreamofthis.tumblr.com/ @moserlea
It has been many years since we have kissed, but still I think about the sweetness of our love. The innocence of it I shall never feel with another, simply because the submission of time has altered the ability to feel innocent now, in the shadow of the past. How special to reflect on a time when words and hand holding were equal parts poetry in life. When your eyelids glistened with the residue of you and I looked at it in its sparkles and thought about all the words I wanted to share with you, and how comfortable I felt having shared the words that were behind us. Eyes closed, we kissed and I stared, you opened your eyes without expression and stared back. How can eyes look so warm and understanding?
That was 10 years ago. We were just high school lovers with lives of unexpected paths in front of us. Now we live life morphing into adults, into being people concerned with bills and car interiors and pensions. There will never be a love so simple, as the era of technology has engulfed both of our worlds, we hold the secret of each other during a time when we could not escape ourselves and so we escaped the through our bodies and music in the passenger seat of my car, cuddled so close that there air fought to leave our lungs.
I still have your poems, and the journal of poetry I would write when thinking about you, hoping one was good enough to give. You were always a better writer, with better hand writing and words and thoughts. I was jealous of you. I was jealous that you could give me paper with huge meaning and I struggled to express the red throb of my heart with my childish scratches. You helped me see how beautiful language is, and I don’t think you know that the love I have for the written word is the only comparable, innocent fulfilling love I have experienced since we ended our nascent affair.
Like a mummified carcass, our love still in form but transcended to some afterlife. Adult life. What I miss the most from that life was being understood, before the complexities of myself would become sharper, fiercer in the face of another who might want to grasp the interior me the way you did.
I lived it without appreciation thinking love would always be as easy as that between you and me, all those years ago in the hallways and parks of our youth. I love you still in the memory of that time, even fiercer now that I have seen the other side of many lovers whose memories I wish I could erase. Thank you for the love, is what I really wanted to say.