shuttle

i do not feel unclean.
you told me about the man that kissed you in the summer
how he made spreadsheets of your days together
documenting every little thing

you should know i do the same
and 
whatever he felt for you
couldn’t have been very different from me
because when you wrapped your warm fingers around my wrist,
tucked your face into my neck
and lay your legs across my own
i wished we were in a film

(pretending we were to get up to try again in five minutes because the mic lowered to catch our gentle conversation beneath the quiet music could be seen in the frame, to get up and laugh off the way that your necklace had pressed its pattern into the skin of my collarbone, and be free of the weight of you in my head and my heart)

so that i might see us in this moment over
and over again
to remind myself that you held me once,
even if it was not in the same way that he held you

you were only tired after all.
and where else were your legs supposed to go?
sitting in those small van seats on our way back home
where i realized that the kind of rest i need 
does not come from sleep