mine

Forgive me, but I'm about to be a girl.

I shaved my legs today, I put on a tiny, pretty, white nightie. It's the kind with lace, a ribbon, satin. It's the sort of thing that belongs in an old movie. It's too small to be worn by a grandmother, and somehow too nice, unsuitable for the more tawdry purposes of small silken underthings. I made my bed just to unmake it. I folded hospital corners into the sheets just so that my smooth toes could have the joy of rumpling them again. I let my hair down.

I read a cookbook, and something a entirely too girly to admit to publicly. I appreciated myself in the mirror and watched myself glow in the low lighting.

I felt pretty and spoiled wrapped in my new, perfectly white comforter in spite of the fact that it has no cover yet. I let myself feel the luxury of new sheets and ignored, for the moment, my bare white walls and my blinds open to the shrubberies behind my apartment, still sleepy with the naked late-winter midnight. I let myself be a silent pink cricket and rub my legs back and forth against each other just enjoying a pretended femininity implied by all the softness. I leaned into my brand new pillows and inspite of my revelry, was lonely.

I remembered a couple I saw a few years ago on a hiking trail in oregon. He was balding, and she had long braids and as many white hairs as black, as if her hair couldn't decide whether or not to match the age in her skin, or the youth in her eyes. They wore identical rain slickers, broken in rain proof shoes, and their hands were joined.

Each of their knuckles were swollen, as though time, and great love, had determined they must never let go, and so had manifested these fattened joints to lock them together, to jigsaw their wrinkles, one into the other, so that either hand alone was the lost piece of a two-part puzzle. The fit implied an intimacy which belied their long years together, and spoke not of one becoming accustomed to the other. There was no weariness in his eyes to complain of the sinking of her breasts.

I could imagine a future for myself much like theirs. A man to measure with me the trek of my breasts toward the curve of my aging hips. One who could measure with me every inch as they every so gradually fell. Humming to me in irony the tune of "London Bridge is Falling Down." And celebrating each millimeter they crept toward decrepitude, because each fraction of a measurement, every hair-width down my chest was another day, another week. Each tiny evaporation of elasticity meant another Sunday morning, deep in bed, him leaned back aganst my chest, between my legs, reading the paper while I smiled at the constellations of liverspots beneath the ever thinning veil of hair atop his lovely head.

I imagined myself, rounder of the hip, fuller in the thighs, sleeping nights with him behind me, the curve around my dot, and we a formata of slowing metabolism, of hours shared, of a lengthening note of love that we would hold until both our breaths failed.

But he is not here. This night is not the night for that man whose hair will creep with every adventure we share from atop is head and sneak out the pores of his ears, his nose, his back. Tonight is not when we use my breasts as a measuring stick, to mark the growth of our time together.

Tonight I am lonely. But my chest is high and proud, and my hair is auburn and bends against shoulders who refuse to believe they might ever be anything but smooth. Tonight my prettiness and my lingerie lend themselves merely to the romanticism of my days and the calming of my tightly wound spirit. There is nothing lurid in it, nothing tawdry.

Some day, after a hundred thousand more adventures, after the faint beginnings of crows feet, or after some grand adventure, after nine thousand more trips to the coffee shop, and as many more poems as I can stand, after more broken bones, more broken hearts, and more happy lies, after a very long time of happy smooth vital limbs, after making love in ways only the very youthful can, there will be a time for measuring days in sinking breasts, and wedging wrinkles together, but not tonight.

I belong to myself and tonight, despite my loneliness, hope and my sweet bed have taken away all desire to share.