A Moment in a Coffee Shop

We are perched lightly together atop coffeehouse stools that,
to us, feel like empyreal godly thrones, and I am blessing my eyes
with your face as if no one else in this room exists, save for you.
I want to say something but I can't. If there are words mighty enough
to illustrate your magnificence, I do not know what they are.
Right now my focus is on you, and solely on you. I do not wish to concentrate
on how this placid, pleasant swell lulling about in my stomach used to be an iron fist
splaying apart my ribs and inserting between them elastics of frustration;
while the doctors rave to us about alcoholics and anorexics, we quietly slit our wrists
in the waiting room, happily slicing away. Don't you wish that you could just crawl
deep into this white void and stay so still that no one knows you are there?

After a while I start to doubt my own existence as well;
how it is I, who feels the anguish despite the fact that it is their hard hand
that drives the knife into my wrist and please let me be the one to slip it out,
like a woman might slip out of her laced nightgown, wedding dress white,
to lay naked in her safe ivory sheets, unaware that a child has died in the next country,
that a boy has put a gun to his face in the next neighbourhood,
that a girl is tracing her veins with a steel flower in the next room,
contemplating how much pain it will be until there is none at all.

How I used to dream of extinguishing myself just to see if anyone would
rush up to me and struggle to keep me breathing,
even if it meant that they would lose the first ten minutes
of their favourite soap or miss a phone call from Mr Opportunity.
Something for me. Everything for you.

How I used to not want to fall asleep for the fear of waking up again.
How some people die because they are too afraid to live and how I was still here
because I was too afraid to die. How my entire existence was once sustained
within this paper thin sheet of metal, my sanity clinging to your braided hair,
hoping that I am crazy enough to want to let go. They wonder why.

He is astonished when he sees the delicate white lines and asks me if I am
ashamed – he believes I am not, as my sleeves brush up against only his elbows.
I tell him that it is surprising how few people notice the split skin even when
it cracks apart right beneath their noses. He has nothing to say to that. I didn't
expect that he would.

As for me, I have yet to be acknowledged but I am grateful to be recognized by you.
How empty I was without you. I don't think I ever realized the void in my substance
until you were around to pave it over.

Flowers nudge their way towards unforgiving heavens through the cracks in the cement
and we must skip along fleetingly as not to scald our bare soles on the sun-roasted asphalt.
The purple waters lapping around our pale feet, sticking sand between our toes,
but the slight discomfort matters not, as here I am, next to you.

I was impervious and failing before you, but now…
now I’ve got something to lose – suddenly there is your voice,
asking me to tell you the best thing that ever happened to me.
I stop studying the bubble boat that drifts along in my caffeinated
Atlantic and the one word slips from my tongue as instinctive
and natural as a refreshing breath of cool summer air. Of course you.
You are every smile that graces my foreign, wondering lips.
You duck your gracious head to conceal your reddening cheeks
as you say, "that's too simple."

Suddenly, I remember the time when you explained to me how
I had lifted you up from something awful.
That was the most gratifying thing anyone's ever told me. Not just
the feeling that I was needed, which in itself was both exhilarating and
somewhat alarming, but the knowledge that I could in fact alter someone,
for the better - but I just hide my smile behind this Styrofoam prism of cappuccino
and let you believe what you wanted to.