The Writer

I said to myself "I know this person. I know him because I would have written him as a character in the greatest tragedy ever told."
I opened another beer so I could listen but the foam ran over,
leaving a sticky residue between my fingers.
This was somewhat distracting.
He leaned in;
"Don't ever cheat on him," he said, motioning to the man in the room with the greenest eyes "Don't you ever do it."
I remember this because he had the most accusing voice, drunk, disapproving, hostile.
"But I already have." I thought, but it was only ever kissing.
No touching, no dates, no stolen moments
in a stairwell, park, or bedroom;
No love letters. Only kissing,
but I regret the love letters I never recieved.

The writer told me when his relationship had ended
He sent her letters. He had never done this before.
"The most articulate, beautiful love letters."
I paused a moment.
"Lucky her," I said. "What a lucky girl."
Again I sighed and thought "Only kissing."
Wholly meaningless.
What he didn't know was that my infidelity was mental,
mental and constant.
As we spoke, I found myself profoundly attracted to a melancholy which moved me to say to an empty page: "This is what you've always wanted."
"You need me to write this man."

In the lighter moments we mused about graduate programs at
Oxford, Yale, Brown; MFA's caps/gowns and other wholly meaningless things.
He rested his body awkwardly against my legs in a very cold garage
Christmas lights flickering like multi-colored lightning.
From time to time, the engineer would come over and kiss me between drinks and
cigarettes whose smell hung in the air and in my clothing long after he had left.
The writer smoked a thin cigar with no discernable aroma except that it didn't smell like the engineers cigarettes.
I watch him smoke it, long drags giving way to rings and clouds of smoke alternatley
and though I never cared for smoking, I was enamored by it
and wondered what it would be like to be the fog drifting from between his lips.
Being a fuller-figured girl than he claimed to be attracted to,
I knew I would never be quite so intoxicating.
My charm rested on the shoulders of awkward humor and clumsy sexuality,
not the kind of thing most girls get by on.
"This," I said to myself "is fine."
I'm not much for unrequited love, and honestly
[like my writing],
timing is everything
and this certainly was not the time.