disembodied

disembodied

I am disembodied,

free to travel in space or time.

I come to you

without coming to you.

There, I take your hand

without taking your hand.

I ask you to remember

without asking you to remember:

We met as we often did

after long separations

and at intersections of us.

You asked if we could not sit in a car

so you could hug me standing, saying,

“I couldn’t wait to do this.”

I always cherished being near you,

but I can admit this now I think:

I failed to see how frazzled you were.

I failed to see, to acknowledge

how hard you tried to hold onto us

and how that frayed the edges of you.

I ask you if these failures

killed the possibility of us,

or if you simply grew out of me,

out of us—my greatest fear.

•

I found the movie again—

the one I’d stopped watching

in the middle the night before.

I never intended to watch

this movie that seemed trite

but compelled me to watch.

And it was there in this film

I saw flashes of myself,

flashes I didn’t want to see.

And then the predictable:

she kissed him suddenly

raised on her toes, eyes closed.

She pulled away softly and slowly,

still on her toes, her chin turned up,

her eyes closed against this thing, smiling.

These things matter, these givings,

these precious moments lingering

in the space between us, disembodied.

•

I am disembodied

and I raise my hands that are not hands

to feel the vibrations of the universe,

to reach out to reclaim the moment

your heels returned to the pavement

that day you raised on your toes

to hug me, to kiss me, and to let me know

that all of this was everything to you—

if only I had known how to know then.

I am disembodied,

free to travel in space or time.

I return to the day I handed you

a Milan Kundera novel.

I hold the book firmly

as you take it in your hands,

And I look straight into your eyes

looking back into mine to say:

“I am there now and always

without being there now and always.”