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Nuances
NUANCES
That’s how she felt:
used.
Not like a smoked cigarette,
but like a sterling butter-knife put back on the plate.
Not used up, but used like a dictionary; giving definitions, meanings.
She felt happy and “O.K.”, but also a little less-than-close-enough-to-perfect.
She knew how to remedy that, too.
Like she’d told him, “Get Lost!”
Any of him would wash off, wash out, wash away. Ho-hum.
She was all superlatives, incomparables, and incompatibles to him, he’d said. Jerk.
He was the exact epitome of what she’d needed and wanted
last month.
He had turned the page, not she, and left her caught
between the sheets. A fresh green leaf between the passed Past.
Dried, browning leaves, like last year’s.
He left.
The body-heat under the sheet diminished.
He’d been used, also, but he’d never know just how.
Water. A lot like water, like in her Grandma’s old Maytag.
With the long-legged wash-tubs, where the clothes would soak to wash
in the preserved rinse-water of the load before.
Let him soak, or drown, all the same, in their shared memories.
She couldn’t care, now.
All he had been was a medium for her thought-growth.
He brought no nourishment to her: she’d forced herself to grow on her own.
He never did really care about her needs, or her growth (nor his own, truth be told.) Just his ejaculate.
Just self. It’s plain. Sometimes words help; not here, not now. No words fit.
Now he had the solo on unaccompanied phallus.
He had gone, but she was not sad about that.
She was sad because she had loved him.
Once.
