You can be sitting right in front of me.  Easy like that, just type type typing or staring blankly.  I’ll hear a sigh and like a shot I feel your absence.  Still, you’re right there.  You’re sitting right there in front of me, and yet I am anticipating it, I am feeling it, always.

How can I quantify less than before?  It’s as if you are vapor, sometimes heavier and all around me, but mostly just the soft kind that feels like a cobweb against my wrist or cheek or knee. 

I don’t know if you’re special—if this is special.  I can never recall what I felt at the onset with anyone else.  I can’t recall if it was all fabricated torture and longing, or if those things were really there—a record on a loop, coming back around to the same point of origin with merely a different face each and every time.  Does that make it less significant?  Does that make you less significant?  Or me? 

The one distinction I know of:  now.  You’re here now, and I am exactly this way, feeling these things, seeing what I see, right now. 

Sometimes it feels too easy.  Sometimes I think the resentment is already there and I know how this story goes and how it ends and what I will say and what I will do and how it will feel in a year.   Then there’s that sigh.  There is that weight lifting, that hole, that less than before, and all at once I know I have no idea at all.

You’re learning to see me.  I hear it when we’re lying in bed and you begin that series of blinks before folding your arms around me and making some impossible noise that could mean so many things.  I suppose that’s what I always wanted, and never expected to find so terrifying.  

It’s a burning realization—a crippling kind of satisfaction—understanding that for once there is nothing I would change about you.