Forbearance

"A little rice? A little soup? I'd rather die reading the early texts you sent about my breasts. I wouldn't take a picture- infidelity!- and so instead had conjured them with words, for which, with words, you gave me back a tongue we dragged across the skin of common thought. Such is our lot, our shared disease or gift. Like Bernini's angels propped somewhere in Rome"

"across a nave we fetishize remove, which keeps the ideal possible, the possible ideal. So why is life so dull without your veins? Today on Twelfth the drugstore glass reflects a woman braced against a private wind: the wind of her conscience, maybe, spinning on the mandrel of desire. Later, she opens mail. She shops for artichokes and squash, fingering their grooves for information from the flesh. The life I love cannot include you, she"

Speech between two people has stopped, draining color and appetite from the narrator's world. Hunger and sensory absence alternately consume the speaker, who refuses small comforts and instead replays erotic early texts about her breasts. Sexual imagery conjured by language restores a voice that traverses common thought while the relationship hangs between shared disease and gift. Artful metaphors—Bernini's angels, drugstore glass, and kitchen produce—map conscience, desire, and private decisions. A woman negotiates exclusion and longing in silent gestures, shopping and fingering vegetables for fleshly information. The closing image frames how choices narrow possibilities and shape lives.

Read at The Atlantic