Skinny Love

"Like a corkscrew to my heart, ever since we been apart." -Bob Dylan

Dear Possible Love of My Life,

This isn’t funny. Do you see me laughing? Because I’m not. Okay, well, sometimes I am, but only when I’m with you, which doesn’t happen often. I need you so much closer, Possible Love of My Life. All these miles that our lives have put between us make my heart ache until you come visit. And it only hurts more when you leave, like my heart is forcing itself out of every pore in my body in its efforts to be with you. Which, I guess, some people would find funny, but I definitely don’t.

Can I tell you what I hate about you? Everywhere I go, I think I see you. And it never is you. Like the shaggy-haired and slightly bearded someone at the bar the other night, laughing into his pint of Guinness. For an instant, my skin prickled—“Is it him?” But no, it wasn’t you. Clearly. You would never make a trip to my city without telling me, right? But still, I spent the whole night aching for him to come talk to me, hoping his voice would sound like yours, hating every girl he talked to, smiled at. It was ridiculous, embarrassing, even. I felt like a lovesick puppy, pining for someone just because he looked like you for a second when my glasses were off.

“What is with you and that guy?” My cousin asked me, raising one of his dark eyebrows at me disapprovingly after I missed the dartboard completely for the third time in a row. “Do you know him or something?”

I shook my head. “No, he just reminds me of someone…”

“Well, you better quit staring, Stalkerella.”

I stopped looking (sort of), but I couldn’t stop thinking about you, wanting you there with me, drinking beer and throwing sharp things at the wall like it was before I moved. Like it was when you and I sat at the corner bar, the one that was halfway between our apartments, and ate peanuts and sipped whiskey and let our shoulders brush while we talked. I couldn’t stop wanting you there so that you could come home with me at the end of the night, like you never did before. So I could kiss you in my bed until all our clothes were gone. My dart game suffered—I lost. To my aunt, who can’t play darts to save her life. It was a little embarrassing.
*

You are not my boyfriend, you never have been, but how could I forget the night we touched for the first time, the only time, really.

We were camping with Tyler and Stan in the mountains. The beer had once been cold, but after a day of bobbing in melted ice, it warmed up. We drank it anyway, and the empty cans were crushed into a black plastic bag under the picnic table. The fire snapped and the night chill crept in on us and we kept in on the fire until it was so close it felt like I was burning.

Tyler and Stan were the drunkest, but I could feel the cloudy haze of alcohol and pot in my head, and I could feel your closeness to me under the blanket we shared, wrapped around our shoulders, the heat from your body hotter against my skin than the orange-red blaze from the fire.

Stan kept saying, “Fuck you,” and “Fuck this,” and “Fuck everything,” and the firelight sunk into the smile lines around your mouth when you laughed.

Tyler couldn’t stop talking about Becca Lewinn and how her hair looked so soft, he wanted to sleep on it. When he said the word “sleep,” it was like this heavy quilt fell over us and our eyes dropped and Stan said he was going to fucking bed and Tyler nodded, “Yeah me too,” and they went into one tent. In minutes, I could hear their competitive snoring from inside their sleeping bags.

Somehow, in our drunk sleepiness, you and I ended up in the other tent, zipping our sleeping bags together. “To keep us warmer,” you said, pulling another sweatshirt on over my head for me. “It’s a cold one tonight.”

But the sweatshirt didn’t stay on me for long. Your hands, cold fingertips spreading goosebumps over my skin, found their way under all my clothes, tracing letters across my stomach. Your cold nose pressed against my cheek when you kissed me but your mouth was warm and by the time you cupped my breast, thumb skating over nipple, your hands were, too.

In the morning, I woke with your face pressed into the fabric between my shoulder blades and your warm body wrapped tightly around mine. We smiled sideways at each other while you started the fire again and made coffee in our pajamas, drank it sitting side by side while we waited for Stan and Tyler to emerge from their tent.

Why didn’t we just keep going from there, Possible Love of My Life? Why, when the weekend was over, did we go back to being friends? I liked it better when I fell asleep with your kisses drying on my skin.

We stayed friends, not lovers, but I couldn’t keep my hands off you, most days. Like when I shaved your head. All that smooth, long hair of yours—almost down to your shoulders.

“They said I gotta cut it or find a new job,” you told me, standing in my doorway with an electric razor. “So will you just buzz it for me?”

You sat on the toilet in my little white bathroom with your shirt off, your skin still golden from the summer sun. I stood behind you, sliding the razor over your scalp, running my hands through your dark hair as it fell away, and you leaned your shoulders back against me stomach.

You asked me, “How was your date the other night?”

“Fine,” I said, even though it wasn’t, even though every minute I kept wishing I could blink him into being you.

You asked if I let him kiss me goodnight, which was always code for did I sleep with him?

“No,” I said, even though I did, even though his body made mine feel so good and when I came, I mouthed your name to the ceiling.

When all your hair was gone, I brushed your naked back and shoulders with my hand, watching all the long strands of cut hair float down onto my bathroom floor. You stood in front of the mirror and I stood behind you and we both stared at the curve of your skull. It had been hidden under all that hair for so long, seeing the shape of it again was a surprise.

“Weird,” you said, then asked if I had anything to eat.

I wanted to kiss the back of your neck, your shoulder blades, your spine, wanted to press the warmth of you into me, but instead I told you I’d make some spaghetti.
*

“This is insane,” I keep telling myself. “Completely irrational. Time to love someone else!!!!”

And I try. I do, really. But you’d laugh, Possible Love of My Life, if you saw all the boyfriends I’ve had since I moved away from you. Tears would leak out of the corners of your eyes, you’d laugh so hard. Because they all look like you, in their own little ways; they are all pieces of you, second bests.

For example, there was James. His hair was long, but blonde, not dark like yours, and his eyes were green, but not as wide as yours. Also, he did too much coke and his taste in music was regrettable, to say the least. But I settled for a few months when I first moved here, because he smelled like you; like trees and soap and clean laundry. And when I pulled his hair, bunched it in my fists while we fucked in my almost empty apartment, and if I closed my eyes, I could pretend it was your hair clenched tight in my fingers, I could pretend those heavy breaths in my ear belonged to you, that it was your sweaty chest pressed up against mine.

And then there was Memphis. Kevin, really, but he was from Tennessee, so everyone called him Memphis. When I looked at a picture of him the other day, even I laughed. He’s almost your clone, only with a less aesthetically pleasing nose, and he’s shorter, with better clothes. Not that I don’t love your clothes, Possible Love of My Life. Don’t get me wrong; I adore the white V-necks and the blue jeans and the band t-shirts and the striped sweaters and the red Converse All-Stars with the holes in the sides and the vests and the stupid knit hats. I want them strewn all over my floor, separated into clean piles and dirty piles along with my own. But I have to give Memphis credit—he knows how to put an outfit together (which may or may not be a bad sign for his heterosexuality, but that remains to be seen). He’s just not quite as casual and comfortable as you are. Which was exactly what our relationship was like; I could never get comfortable with him. I kept expecting him to be more interesting, to say something that I really wanted to hear, to do something that made me realize why I was with him. But in the end, I realized instead that no, he wouldn’t. But at least there were some records in his collection worth stealing when I left.

Tor came after that. I know, I know. You’re shaking your head and saying, “For fuck’s sake woman, how many more Tors can you cram into you life?” Because you know that Tor is the name of the first guy who broke my heart. And you know that it’s also the name of my little brother. You, Possible Love of My Life, let me fall asleep in your bed with you when First Tor broke my heart. And you sat with me and my brother Tor on the couch in my parents house and watched “The Fox and The Hound” over and over again until he fell asleep. You were there for all of it. And if you had been there when I met Second Tor at that stupid concert, you would have leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Bad Idea!” But you weren’t there, and I let the new Tor in. He had most of the requirements: rarely maintenanced hair, occasional facial scruff that eventually turned into a full-on beard, a Bob Dylan obsession to rival my own and a childish sense of humor coupled with a biting wit, just like you. And for a while, with Tor the Bad Idea, I forgot about you. It’s true. I did. Which explains why I didn’t return your phone calls for a few months there. Which explains why I started thinking that maybe he could take your place in the pit of my heart and the back of my mind. I really believed he could make me love him more than I loved you.

But I was wrong, obviously. Because he turned out to be not that great. He turned out to have some other girlfriends on the side, which he was masterful at keeping from me, until he wasn’t anymore. Until I caught him red-handed, with his pants down and all that great stuff everyone thinks only happens in movies, so it hurts twice as much when it actually happens in real life.

After Tor, my cousin asked me, “What is it with you and all these hairy, mountain-men-looking dudes?”

“I’ve been watching a lot of Westerns lately,” I said, as if that explained anything. Which it didn’t, really. At all.

But you see, Possible Love of My Life, I didn’t want my cousin to know that the reason they all seemed the same is because I am looking for someone else in their eyes, in their unkempt hair, the shape of their lips and the bow of their legs. I didn’t want my cousin to know that I was looking for you.

Because it isn’t funny, Possible Love of My Life, what you do to me. It isn’t funny that I keep coming back to you, again and again, that all these other men are just distractions. It isn’t funny that you make me want to be somewhere other than where I am, because I like this place, I like my life, except that you’re not in it the way I want you to be. And it isn’t funny that you have no idea, that you’ll ask me who I wrote this about, and I’ll be dying to tell you, to say, “I WROTE IT ABOUT YOU, POSSIBLE LOVE OF MY LIFE! IT’S ALL ABOUT YOU! THEY’RE ALWAYS ABOUT YOU!” But instead, I’ll give you some vague, bullshit answer about how it’s fiction, I’m a fiction writer, and I was just trying to get into the mind of one of my characters, writing in her voice, not mine, and do you want to read some of my novel and see?

It isn’t funny how you are quite possibly THE love of me life, but you haven’t the slightest clue as to how much you mean to me. Or you didn’t until I called you, drunk and sloppy, last night. “Possible Love of My Life,” I said into the phone receiver, “I think I love you.”

You would not say anything back, so, like always, I just kept talking. “I think I love you like kissing in bed all day long and sitting on the same side of the booth while we eat dinner and holding hands on the street. I think I love you like let’s do our laundry together and you can put your books on the same shelf as mine, the red one in the living room or even the blue one next to my bed, the one that all my favorite books are on. You could put your favorite books on that shelf, too, because I think I love you like maybe you could move in with me and we could sit at the kitchen table in the morning with the sunlight on our shoulders and do a crossword puzzle together while we drink tea. I think I love you like that.”

You still did not say anything, and so I said quietly, “Say something, please.”

“Um,” you said.

Because I can’t stand the sound of silence, I kept going, kept talking and talking and talking. “Remember that time,” I said, “when my car broke down and you drove two hours to pick me up even though it was pouring rain that might as well have been snow, it was so cold? Do you remember that? Did you love me at all, then? And what about when you walked in on me when I was changing for my date with that guy who wanted me to suck his dick under the table at the restaurant so I kicked his shins and left? You burst into my room and I was standing there in just my underwear and you stopped in your tracks and stared and I stared back and we just stood there, looking and finally I said, Maybe I should get dressed, and you nodded and said, Maybe you should, but I could tell that every part of you wanted to kiss me as much as I wanted to kiss you? Did you love me then?”

Then, Possible Love of My Life, you did not say what I wanted you to say (“I’m coming, I’m getting in the car now and I’m driving for eight hours without stopping and I will be there soon and then I’ll show you how much I loved you then,” is what I wanted you to say). You said, “You’re drunk, aren’t you?” You said, “I think you should go to bed and I’ll forget this ever happened.” You said, “Goodnight.”

No. No, Possible Love of My Life, I do not want you to forget. That’s why I’m writing you this letter, so that you will not forget. Ever. I’m tired. Tired of just being friends, tired of letting you kiss me accidentally when we’re drunk and waking up friends. Tired of going through second best after second best. Tired of waiting for you to hear what I’m not saying. So I’m saying it, now. And I’m waiting for you to not forget.

Yours. Really,
Me