This Fish Needs A Bicycle

those borrowed clothes

He knew whose clothes I was wearing, having pulled them out of the closet for me himself that morning.

He’d gotten up earlier and told me to “sleep a little longer” while he went for breakfast makings. I had smiled and mumbled “mmmm, breakfast,” but secretly, I suspected he was mostly going out to get cigarettes. For whatever reason, he thinks I mind, and apologizes when his breath tastes of Camel Lights.

I don’t mind.

I pulled on the boxers and the too-big gingham shirt, rolling the sleeves and buttoning just one button. Right in the middle.

He made breakfast. I drank coffee and read Rolling Stone. We spent the rest of the morning breakfasting, catching the end of a movie -- his favorite fight scene, puttering around the computer, posting on web logs. He came back from the shower, towel slung low. We kissed like we invented kissing. This is the way it goes from friends to lovers. A kiss. One button.

Afterwards, I napped in the red gingham shirt. No buttons.

“We’re lovers,” he’d said once when a friend asked how we were connected.

“Were.” I corrected him. By then, nearly an entire month had passed without any face time, and I’d been a little surprised, if not annoyed, at his presumption. “We were lovers.”

“Misplaced the apostrophe,” he’d said.

Within ten minutes, we’d found ourselves alone, grasping in the dark, updating our status.

Affairs are typically brief and conveniently uninvolved on any level other than the romantic one. Friendships are the opposite. And we? A juxtaposition of the two. Romantic, passionate, clandestine. Frank, interdependent, practical.

Sweaty. Entangled. Unstable. Complicated.

And not.

If we had business cards for relationships, then, I guess he and I would have to come up with titles. There are witnesses to the fact that he referred to me as his ‘girlfriend’ once. He'd said it in a proprietary sort of way, as though to mark his territory. Had he intended it differently, the term may have made me nervous. Time runs out for girlfriends faster than it does for lovers. Or affairs. Or friends. Or dirty little secrets.

Whichever applies.

This affair of ours requires no mood lighting or dimmer switches to conceal any physical imperfections. Nor for the moment does it require any excess light to clarify the more glaring, metaphysical ones.

Though, curtains might be nice for the neighbors’ sakes on some warm Saturday afternoons.

Posted by This Fish at June 14, 2004 06:57 AM