%^@$*&#?!,. : Stay

Stay

She was lying on the bed wearing nothing but a thick layer of sweat. The sounds that had hung in the air a second ago were now littering the carpet and soon my whole room would be woven with her memory.

“How are you feeling?” she asked, eyes engaged with the ceiling fan.

Her name was Ingrid. I didn’t know her last name, but I knew how she liked her eggs and coffee. I knew every strand of her long black hair and every curve of skin over her exposed ribcage. I knew how the shadows fell on her face and how her voice cracked whenever she was near tears, which, these days, happened often.

I was standing across from her, watching as she leaned over to the night table and lit a cigarette before lying down again. I ran my fingers through the smoke and now my hand was hers.

“How are you feeling?” she asked again.

When we had met, she had told me that she was just passing by. She would be gone just before I realized how much I needed her. And all I wanted to know was how deep into her soul I could get just from her eyes.

And how was I feeling now? I didn’t know. I wanted to pick my words carefully around her because everything she said was fleeting poetry. How could I tell her that I was scared of losing her and even more scared of being with her? How could I say that I was relieved when she was gone, but wanted her to stay when she was in my arms?

I wanted to memorize her angles, to match my pulse to her pulse. I wanted to hear her voice traveling through her body. I wanted her scars and birthmarks. I wanted to touch every crevasse and corner. I wanted to expose each of her smiles. I wanted her.

The cigarette was wilting and it became our hourglass.

I joined her on the bed, wrapped my arm around her, and watched as it bounced with her breathing. She tossed the cigarette into a water bottle.

“Answer me.”

She was searching my face for a response and I gave it to her with my lips. With our limbs entangled, I knew that this would be the last time.

When we were done, she rolled off the bed, closed the blinds, and returned to my grasp. We looked at each other and I could see in her eyes that she was already leaving. So I wrapped around her tighter and thought of her happier and took every piece of her that I could save for myself.

“You won’t be here when I wake up.”

“I won’t.”

And how could I explain it? How much longer could I go without begging? How could she be nearly melting into my body without being present?

“Please stay,” I whispered, pleading with every shred of my heart, through every pore of my body.

She sighed gently as more sounds fell to the floor. And there it was, every part of her life hovering away to some distant land I’d spend the rest of my life trying to find.

And there she was, collapsing without falling, while I fell asleep to the sound of her last breaths.