The Favorite Ex
My soul never stepped inside another person’s so easily as it stepped into yours. I felt safe in there. Nothing changed. I was just physically there with you. It was a world without mirrors.
My soul never stepped inside another person’s so easily as it stepped into yours. I felt safe in there. Nothing changed. I was just physically there with you. It was a world without mirrors.
It seems that any woman he gazes at for more than two seconds become ensnared in his workaday web, spun out of boredom and sexual desire. Who can blame him for spinning it?
You don’t strain the way I do to maintain a facade of order and rhythm. You just are. And in your presence I just am: I feel normal.
Being single appears to be a celebration to the young(ish) men in my life. To their exact female contemporaries, it’s just an accepted reality.
I cannot see the middle of a relationship at the beginning, but I can see the end from the middle. I know that there will be an end. There has to be. This is just a stop on the road.
I think about the things we’ve done when we’re away from this place, and I wonder whether once we get far enough away from its gravitational pull, we spin off our axes, we lose our way.
As I enter the shop on any given morning, he becomes ebullient, or so it seems, and so do I. Recently I’ve taken to looking at the ground to hide the fact that I’m smiling.
For years I have been trying to impress you from afar. An unintended consequence of this is that I have, now and then, been able to impress myself.
I don’t know what shapes we will shift into over the course of our lives. But I have seen so much death lately, and to me, you are just a little more alive than everything else.
He imprinted himself onto my mind, becoming an indelible part of my understanding of men. Because of him, I determined that men were always to be distant, preoccupied with their own arcane desires and unquenchable sense of adventure.