From the moment I set the fire, all of my life was an argument against keeping my love alive. I tried to hold on to what I believed was uniquely mine, fearing that when I lost it I would be nothing at all. But now, I could feel how much of my resolve was already gone. And I could also feel a part of me beginning to wish that my love would finally start to recede. It lay on me like an intolerable heat; it pressed my thoughts like a fever that wouldn’t break. It was worse than mourning because grief was corrupted by hope; I could not even turn my love into memory.
I couldn’t stop myself from longing for her. The feel of her small hard toes as I knelt before her with the tarnished-nickel nail clipper, the oak-colored birthmark on her inner thigh, the double orbit of platinum hairs that circled her belly button. “Trust me,” she said the time we made love and she wouldn’t let me come and she was on top with her hands on my shoulders, moving slower and slower like all human time running down and I was kicking at the mattress as if I were being electrocuted, and the way she said my name as if it were a secret, not softly, yet sometimes in a roomful of people only I’d hear it, which was just one of the thousand things we could never explain—all of these images I thought I was preserving so we could still have them when we were reunited, but now they came unbidden, they did with me whatever they wanted, and they ruled me with their limitless command.
