2 Shorts That Went Nowhere

(These were drafted on 6/17/07 and forgotten, because they were going nowhere.)

Love is like a bruise. You nearly always get it when you're not looking - especially when you're not looking.

Love bruises. Love is bruises.

Love appears like a bruise, like when you misjudge the distance between yourself and the object you are trying to avoid running into but manage to anyway. Love is the bruise that aches and also the one that doesn't ache which you eventually forget about. Sometimes love is the multi-hued shiner that leaves you awed and a little freaked out; sometimes it is so ugly you wish for it to go away. Of course, it only goes away when it's ready, not when you wish of it. But when Love leaves, it leaves bruises.

I have bruises. I get them all the time, walking into things, hitting things, getting hit by things. They are all accidental; I guess I misjudge. A lot.

:::

I never developed my favorite snapshot of her. I cannot remember when I took it, but it is my favorite.

In it, she is posed on the couch, one arm flung over her head, grasping the headrest, her head resting in the crook of her arm. I am also in the picture, she is looking down at me, intently. Her ass rests at the edge of the seat, her knees apart; one leg is slung over my shoulder, foot pointed, toes running up and down my back, her other leg folded, heel resting against a buttock. My cheek rests against the inside of her thigh, my hair blanketing her knee and shin.

I never developed the photo because I never took it.

Sometimes, late at night, before nodding off, I wonder if she were even real. Maybe I had imagined her all this time.

No. I have a mental snapshot of her, of us, have I not?

And my body is a diary of her and of us, it remembers things that my mind cannot recall, things my memory no longer is a hundred percent sure of: My cheek remembers the silken pillow of her inner thigh, my back the callouses on her foot, my tongue her body in entirety, her essence.

My eyes are twin lenses that captured a single image of her and me. Single, meaning 'one'; one, meaning no 'her' no 'me', one meaning only 'us'.

It is my favorite snapshot, but I never could develop it.