T-shirt

Musky and a little sour, personal, too intimate. My nose is pressed into the underarm of your t-shirt and I’m there again, in the little apartment with no view, watching you strip after the gym. You’d hold up your arm and chase me until my face was buried there. I pretended I didn’t want you to, but I did. I loved the smell of you. I think of your sharp mind and gentle spirit and the way you held me. 

***

Dusty and damp, it smells like knowledge. I’m full of ideas and myself. You’re full of skepticism and mystery. When we are thrust together by the gorgeous paradox of chance and choice, I think you aren’t special and I’ll figure you out like the others; a problem I can solve by rote, memorized moves on a board. 

Eyes, dry and rough like sand. My stomach yowls. You look at me and laugh; our first secret. We’ve been working together, hours longer than we need. I can’t get enough of you and you enjoy my fascination. You won’t answer my questions outright; you don’t bend when I smile that private, personal, special smile I give to everyone. You challenge my ideas and respect my mind. I am climbing off my pedestal to follow you; away from the crowds that I desperately seek to please; into a place of self-respect and indifference to the opinions of others. I admire you, aloud and inwardly. I ask you to come to things: parties, game nights, bars. You refuse. You say you’re unsociable with strangers. I keep asking under the guise of friendship until you relent and it begins in earnest.

Warm, sticky vinyl, ripping against my skin when I move out of the booth. I come back and make everyone move again. You don’t mind because you have reserves of patience, vast and hidden like cavernous lakes underground. The pizza is there, gleaming with grease that tastes like friendship. Other voices obscure Dani’s words even though she’s half-shouting over loud laughs from other tables. I think she’s asking if anyone knows the answer. I don’t. I lay hot cheese on my tongue and pant because it burns. You look at me and smile because you think I’m funny and I feel like I’m upside down and spilled out. It’s the Hebrides, you say. You’re calm and unhurried like you don’t care if we know how smart you are and I feel impressed with your knowledge and with your lack of ego. 

Pillowy, melts on the tongue, sugar-sweet. Dissolving in my mouth like innocence. It’s after midnight and I’m drunk and you were sleeping when I called but you came anyway. The shop is painted light blue and smells of fried dough; a friendly place. We’re careful, revealing little yet reading volumes: a glance, a phrase, a touch. Did you mean to press your shoulder against mine just then? Do you return obsessively to the look we shared, the one where you saw through my insults like clear water? Does your body come alive, gunpowder and sparks, when our hands reach for the last one and find each other instead? You concede it to me because you’re selfless and I take it because I’m not. 

Minute sensations, discrete and distributed over my scalp like current. My head’s in your lap and your hand’s in my hair, touching softly because I asked you to. A bold claim to an intimacy I’m not sure we share. I look up at you and I’m upside down. You kiss me and the world rights. It’s a flawed kiss; I was unprepared and respond too late. Our timing was off and our mouths barely brush, but it has a magic about it and it tastes of possibility.

Warm cotton of your t-shirt. Feeling summons to my skin when I move against your body. It’s the first time we’re together and I’m afraid of what it means, and it’s not perfect, but you are and I love you and I don’t admit it, even to me.

Yeast and malt and the wet smell of beer. Everyone’s in costume but you and I have something to hide. We’re flirting, masked with an argument about the game that I won, though you say you should have. I want to kiss your wine-stained mouth but the threads we’ve woven are delicate. 

Rhythmic pressure of breath on my neck. Heat, not mine but yours. Feathers of hair on my skin as our legs entwine. Drugged weight of new wakefulness. My temple against your shoulder, a place of worship. Pulling in your sacred scent by the lungful. You leave in the morning but you’ve left your shirt, sweaty from the gym. I agonize over the significance of this and I breathe where the scent is strongest, hoarding the molecules like pills. 

Fryer oil, heavy, coating my tongue, and tequila, sharp and acrid. We’re laughing because your friend is in town and he’s telling us about his tiny apartment that costs half his paycheck. You ask ‘when was it built?’ He answers ‘around 1920- BC.’ Your laugh is so fresh it’s like your body makes it from scratch for every joke. We don’t tell him, but he knows from the new language we speak, a language of glances and smiles and the distance between our bodies.

Soft and unsupported, I sink into your couch. The episode plays, innocuous, hardly watched. Our elbows graze inadvertently, sending complex signals to my brain. I don’t pull away. My body condenses to a single patch of skin. I’m a distant observer, the story on the screen second to the drama playing out on your couch. Then the story changes; it blossoms around loss. Sadness grips my throat like a reptile’s mouth and tears come. They’re hot and compressed like diamonds. You’re kind, instinctively, like I never know how to be. You bring me tissues to absorb the evidence of my weakness. You don’t embarrass me with questions or concern. I wonder if you sense the grief I carry around like an overfull bucket, any jostle slopping sorrow over its rim. 

Downy kisses of snow on my cheek. Numb lips moving; desperately slow. Clumsy fingers in your hair, telling you what I can’t. Yours under my sweater, taking on my heat where they touch; our skin feels indistinct. When you say you want us to be more than we are, I see something in you that’s guileless and whole and it burns like your cold fingers on my skin. I say I don’t want what you want though I do. You are gracious. You hide your hurt and I hate myself. 

Sap, ancient and woody. Cinnamon and cloves, spicing the air. Buzz of voices, cheerful, glad. Slick shiny paper under my fingertips. Outside, flavorless cold in my mouth. I wave goodbye to loved ones and I’m thinking of you. Sheets against my skin, chill like a slab of marble, hungry like an animal in a den. Stillness, silence. No rustle of your hair on the pillow. No groans from the mattress as you shift. No hand on my waist, a gentle question. My response yielded from an undiscoverable place: anything, always, yes. Now, a plunging hollow like a drain into space. I wonder; could we? White light blazes into the darkness. I type in your name, each character frightening like defusing a bomb. High trilling tone in my ear, clutching the phone to my face like a bandage to a wound. Anticipation and hope swirl in my lungs. It’s the holidays and second chances are thrown around like ribbon. You don’t pick up. I feel the weight of you on my chest.

Percussive, abrasive, vibrating my teeth. Musty, stifling, too many bodies. Soles stick to the floor. Words sloppy at the edges, face blurred and eyelids drooping. Sour; vodka and citrus. Breath too hot on my neck. He’s not you, but maybe I can pretend in the dark. Flat of a palm on my back. Relief of quiet and cloth seats. Brow resting on cool glass.

Frictionless; denim over vinyl. I slide into the booth. Our friends are together again. We are together again. I am radiating a painful kind of hope, an idiotic happiness. I am opposite you and you’re next to her. She touches your arm and I balk, but you don’t, you accept it like reality. You’re looking at her and smiling and then too slow, woefully slow, I’m guessing; dreading; knowing. Pressure on my chest like a hand, air squeezed from my lungs. Face rigid like plaster; a cast. I thought you would give me more time; my wounds were barely scabbed over. I thought everything unsaid you knew. I had felt raw, like a skinless collection of organs, so exposed the motion of molecules was unbearable. 

Coffee, bitter and complex. Sounds of traffic passing over my ears. Shoes wet through. The bus doors open and I miss my stop because I’m looking at your picture on the internet and she’s in it and you look happy. Spring rains patter on the window and shadows of droplets glide down my face. 

Warm air on bare shoulders. Too much wine, pleasantly acidic. Sounds of familiar laughter, sounds of glass touching glass. Sun of a summer’s end casting long shadows, drifting away. The celebration tapers and we gather for hugs and goodbyes. When it’s your turn we hover, uncertain; you pull me to you with one arm and I steal the scent from your neck like sustenance. Your fingers squeeze my ribs in the sensitive place beneath my arm, but you don’t hurt me; you encompass all of me in this one gesture. Your mouth lingers near my ear wishing me well and my bones resonate with your voice like a forgotten instrument remembering the shape of the right note. We let go and part. You look at me too long and my want is so sharp it sucks the air from me. I crumple towards my center, a vacuum in an empty tin. You leave, head bent, hands hidden.

Hot breath of the subway in my face. Hard plastic beneath my bones. Unfamiliar streets laid out before me. New and unknown, a place and not yet a home. My soles on hard floor. A dresser drawer opening, the strained sound of wood against wood. Worn cotton, navy blue. It smells like you and regret. I fold it and place it in its drawer and wonder how much of you I have left. 

Rigid and dry, cardboard rips through my skin like fabric. I’m bleeding and I feel nothing but the force of my own body pushing more of it out through the tear. It’s been a year since I moved but I need to move on. A pile of cloth, carefully folded, placed into the box marked ‘give away.’ It’s no great loss; the smell of you had faded anyway. I don’t follow you anymore and I’m lost. No one has since done what you did to me: show me who I always was. 

Pollen and honeysuckle, saccharine, raw. Green grass tickles my cheek. The breeze feels nice. It feels like renewal. I’m at the park, a book in my hands. I think about you. Your allergies would have rendered you incapacitated, a wet mass on the floor. I don’t feel how I used to when my mind conjures you like a spirit. You’re benevolent now; no longer haunting. I’m still full of ideas, but less of myself. You opened me and I am grateful. 

Hands moist and throat dry. I’m speaking to a crowd of thirty and parts of my body are shaking like a weak-limbed foal. I turn from the screen to the listeners and you’re there, smiling. My body dissipates like a spent cloud. I stumble on and my mind is divorced from my mouth, speaking of things and thinking of you. After, you tell me I did well. You saw my name on the program and thought you’d say hello. Something tender opens in me that I thought had healed over harder. You ask if I want to get dinner and I say yes though I would have said yes to anything. 

Steaming broth savors deeply of patience and time. We drink sake and I barricade questions, overeager like horses at the gate. We speak of neutral things, work and friends and where I live. The meal is over and you haven’t said her name and I thrash with worry that this is a bad sign. We put on our coats, silk-lined sleeves cool like water. The barricade breaks; I ask you how she’s been. You gift me a smile, exquisite and sad, and for a second, an eternity, I’m tortured for its meaning. We broke up, you say, and I soar. I tell you I’m sorry but we both know I lie. I am buoyed up into the night like the rich scent of pork as we exit onto the sidewalk. 

Rum and cinnamon and apple and the taste of your mouth. Muffled sounds through the floor above, music: a saxophone, drums, a handsome voice. Footsteps, dancing. We are both drunk and laughing, snatching a breath before our friends and family drown us in well wishes. I touch your collar, thick fabric, a tux. Your hand on my ribbon, white silk. We are delirious, unable to speak, so we kiss and I don’t know how to take any more happiness into my person.

***

My nose in your shirt sleeve, dry and pleasant. I toss it into the basket with the other laundry. You’ll be home in an hour, smelling of hard metal and sweat. You’ll chase me like you always do. I’ll give in. You’ll hold me and I’ll breathe a part of you into myself and I’ll remember.