Love, Crave

I love a man I should not. He is not my husband. I have no right.

I love a man I should not. He is tall, solid, warm, low, and rumbly. I love him secretly, when I am alone, at night, in dark, quiet places.

I've written of him in other places, to other people. If words could purge him from me, entirely, cleanly, make him gone, or never was, I would write of him tirelessly to be free of him.

Because I love him, and I should not. It is folly. He's tender, gentle, kind, smart, and attentive. I love him painfully strong, big, overwhelming.

I don't want to love him. I want to love the man I married. I despair of this love.

He loves me back, clings like a cockle bur to me even when he isn't there, reminds me with his scent on the breeze - pine, smoke, something indefinably him.

When he is not there, I crave his heat, surrounding me, melting the ice I so carefully layered around my heart to ward him off.

When he is not there, I crave his presence, nestled against me in the night, skin to skin, feeling him along the length of me, his breath a mantra in the dark.

When he is not there, I crave his kisses, soft, sweet, insistent, passionate, toe-curling, breath-stealing kisses. Grown-up kisses. Kisses that leave me stunned, delighted, feeling well and truly loved.

When he is not there, I search for him, desperate for a few stolen moments...and when he is there, I run from him, craven, craving....

It's a hell of a thing when you're haunted by a dream, a figment, a construct of the imagination; when someone who isn't there, never was, fills the emptiness, completes the spirit in a way the man you married can't, won't, doesn't even know is there.

Choking On It

There are tears swimming along the edges of my eyes. They sting, they make my vision blur at odd moments, and they are the suspended promise of sweet, salty release, relief. I can't seem to shed them.

I don't dare shed them.

I'm afraid that once begun, they will never stop, or not until I have wept, and wept, and flooded every valley, sent the small creatures running for the peaks, forced people to swim or paddle canoes to rooftops, wait for rescue, all while the torrent continues.

They're caught in my throat, making it hard to swallow...although perhaps I am better off not swallowing them, as I am told that swallowing sorrow, anger, unspoken words causes cancer in the stomach, as does swallowing any evil thing.

I feel as though I am choking on them, the struggle hampered by the ligature of my life, of the lines wrapped around me, binding me to a place I do not want to be but lack the courage to cut myself free from.

So here I sit with this unutterable something lodged in my mind, my eyes, my heart, my throat, and I'm choking on it.