in the woods i can hear the trickle of your fingers on the guitar string, murmuring little things that you might have never said had it not been for the wind. and it rises but you don't speak any louder and all of the things you might have never said are carried up and outwards, over hills and into the damp spaces under things. the little children see them and give chase, following the upward lift and light of all the things you might have never said. maybe they want to never say them too, or maybe they just want to know, as i do, the things that you might have never said, had it not been for the wind.

sometimes i forget this thick layer covering me and can't see it for the holes, the pulls and the dropped stitches. sometimes it gives no warmth at all, though it did yesterday and the day before, thought it is heavy and woollen, though it should give warmth. sometimes i can't help but see lack where there is a laden table, heat where there is hearth, smoke where all there is is fire. sometimes i can't remember to hold hands that aren't holding mine, to touch faces that need to be touched. sometimes, i am a vanished shadow, set before the sun even lets the shape of me fade. and then from the thickening cloud of all of this i have made, i remember all i have to do is step outwards and upwards from under it, that you will catch me when it starts to fall. that i will catch myself.

tonight is thick with heavy drops of rain and the weight of lightning, just above the line of the clouds. i walk out to the porch and say come and watch the lightning and you say coming as you open the window. out there all i am watching is the shape of your face in the shadow of the night, the knoll of your shoulder making way for my arm. this is the place i live, i think, the place where i am wearing your pajamas and it is six pm and we are cooking.

tonight i am breathing into the shape of the bed around me, into the hollows and crooks of my own skin. tonight i am looking through the frame of the world that i give it, the black lines i have drawn around things. sometimes i think i forget what is important and then wake steadier because i have never known. these are the last few days of this waiting, the last few days of this two monthed, nine weeked space i have made, and i wonder if i am satisifed. i wonder if the wholeness i feel will be found again later, in the nook at the front of the stairs where i found that coin once, where i curled in against the shape of my childhood and slept. i wonder if these are all skins i can shed and sew, i can fashion into the shapes i might want now and later. i wonder what it will feel like when this absence is made real with its ending, in the awkward moments of some final waiting, the rattle of breathing as it fills and leaves my lungs, the shape that eyes make, found on the floor. i wonder if wanting things could ever be wrong. if in wanting, we make absence.

in the picture of my life i hold in my head, the greying one that is browned at the edges, the one i might hold in papered hands and pass to people younger than me, there, i realise, i am always alone. bent down at an awkward place in my back, a place not meant for bending, with the broadest of chests and the longest of shoulders, i rest my gentle fingertips on the things that i have loved. i wonder if there might ever be a thing to share it with, a shape to sidle up next to in the wee hours of the eighty yeared nights. with feet fitted under blankets into one another, the right on the left, warming in handshake.

today i tuck you into my hip, the curve of bodies and the way they fit together. today, i hold your back up with the cup of my hand, as if you couldn't on your own and maybe you can't. this is what it might have been like, i think. the rising bubble of your breathing makes a space in the room and i can hear it as i press my face against the door, then slowly back away, creakless, down the stairs. are all lives this precious or just ones smaller than ours? jump up, pull them down! lemons!

what is in that one note risen straight up from the page, the shape of it wholly filed and gentle to the edges, dancing on the upward curve of your lips. do you know how long it is since i saw your face?

i think of how the hard thing will be to choose, how this is all indescribable. the feeling of this morning, waking to the back of my friend, grey against yellow - what was that to my heart? how the sun every day streaks itself in a ramble on the sky, how it is all colours and no colour, all at once. to breathe in and to breathe out - what is that? how can we begin, and once we have, is there any ending it? is this why we say things like love? because we like to think we are saying something, we like to name it, even if the name is not attached to anything, even if it is floating, up there above the clocks and the church spire, up there on the pitch of the wind.