Love In 2014

Yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Better than ever I remember his face. Especially on Christmas days when the sun hangs in the sky like a brass gong shivering in the blue summer heat. Especially here at South Bank. Where we first met.
But there is never time to go back, not until it’s too late.
Across the park old men talk on benches, scaly and broken veined legs red and weeping, bare to the sun. Tomorrow’s promise is death. Today’s is depression, and no energy to save oneself. No energy to care. No space to breathe.
Had he really been so oblivious.
Mel?
I remember dreaming of him. Not often. Now and then. He wears a plastic bag over his face. His mouth is huge and black. The bag stretches tight across the space between his teeth. He wants to scream. I want to reach out and break the membrane, gouge his eyes until his mouth fills with blood, scream my black rage. Try to wake him.
Mel! Mel! I didn’t know you were back.
What. What?
Joey? Should I laugh, sound surprised, jump up. Fake it.
Yeah - I didn’t know you were back.
I didn’t know I’d been away.
Where have you been keeping yourself? Jude said…
Judy said -?
She said you’d be all right.
Did she?
Let me buy you a coffee?
He arranges himself in the chair. The light is white on his face. I am in his sunglasses. He moves. Shuffles the chair. Places his glasses on the table between us.
Flat white, he says to the waiter and looks at me: Low fat soy?
The waiter, a baby boy with calf eyes and acne moves off, fat breasted pigeon in tow.
So.
So.
What have you been up to? His glasses wink.
Oh the usual staying alive staying sane surviving -
Aren’t we all.
He looks around.
Waiting for someone?
No.
His finger flutter against the wing of those glasses. You’re not smoking…
A fleck of paint slides under my fingernail. Locked in a glance with his glasses I give nothing away. My index finger tastes of iron.
I never wanted to talk with commas floating in the air.
…anymore. No.
All I'd wanted was a place where we both could hear each other.