Pensive Love

Illustration: Cathy Zhang

He is a horribly inconsistent lover. I think his mind is busy and he forgets certain things sometimes. I can’t argue that we don’t spend time together; every day his thick coarse hands reach down and draw me out of my darkness. Every time I see that latch open, my heart races and my mind spins with the wondrous possibilities that await me. But when he is done with me, back I go into that dark cavern desecrated with pencil shavings and spilt ink, with erasers and highlighters as my only companions against the steely cold of that case I call a home. But that’s not true, that’s not my home, my home is that firm embrace between his thumb, index and ring fingers. That’s where I belong, where I feel safe, where he loves me.

He presses my lips against the fibrous white page, and I let go, I just…let go, and let him do with me whatever it is he wants. It is remarkable to watch; he is the source, the well, and as his tendons contract and his shoulder muscles flex, I slide from right to left across the page and become his conduit, the connection between his mind and the world, the key to his immortality. What more could I ask for? His ideas, his hypothesis, his assignments, his work, his documents, they all come to life at the touch of my inky lips. Every deed of good and evil that is contained within his mind, every poem, comes out through me. Yet he never writes me poems.

He never writes me songs or kisses me gently, the way it says across all those pages. And unless he’s in a spell of creativity, he never holds me gently. He grasps me, like some object, firmly in his grip. He bites down on me; he drops me on the floor. Why? I do anything for him, everything for him, live my lonely existence just to make him be something, just to let him live. Don’t I deserve something? Something real. Something more that superficial grasp he places upon me with his thumb, his index and his ring finger. Don’t I?

But everything is fine I suppose. He’s taken so many courses. He writes so many poems. And he has all his university applications. As long as he refills me, as long as that latch keeps opening, as long as I can still be his, everything will be okay. It is okay, I know that, I do. He’ll be there, and I’ll be waiting, waiting to fall in love.