To my dream of Tuscany

I thought about you last night. Between fitful tosses and turns in my somewhat empty bed, I thought of you. It has been the first time in such a long time that you have walked across my mind. Perhaps it was because it was the day of the Melbourne Cup… because I remembered you piggy backing me across the car park at the race course so the gravel wouldn’t get into my strappy high heels and hurt my feet. We were brazen and did not care that day. Did not care about the many eyes that were watching our every move, waiting for us to falter and concede that yes, we were actually together. We were actually having an affair. A man and a girl, someone young enough to be his daughter but on that day, we didn’t care.

 

It has been three years now since our lips last touched one another’s. Three years since all the lying and frustration and pain that was our whirlwind affair. It has been three years since we talked of our children and how loved they would be. It has been three years since I walked out and did the only honourable thing. The one thing you could not do. You vowed you would never walk away from me, and you never did. But you left me so many times and each time my heart broke a little more.

 

Our love blossomed in the silent, captive confines of my small car. Far too small for love making, and yet somehow we managed. Our love grew abundant in the soft ambiance of hotel rooms where we remained nameless and faceless. I was like your only doll, and I was small and fragile in your large calloused hands. Three years on and I can still remember the way you smell. And I can still see myself lying on my side in a bed, watching your lips form your words, this was one of my many happy pastimes with you. Watching your lips form words and speak to me as if I were the only thing in the world that mattered to you.

 

I wonder why, in the darkness you are still able to make me feel this longing. The complete and unharnessed support of being loved by you has left me ruined for love. for it seems that the moment we met, we knew. We knew the other would change our lives for ever and that there would be no going back to how things once were in our lives. Pandora’s box had been opened the moment you shook my hand and our lives forever transformed what was it in my voice that day that made you need to know me? I still wonder how it was that you could love me so completely. So scarred and damaged at the hands of another man. You collected each and every small piece that remained of me and was somehow able to piece me back together. Occasionally, I would fall to pieces again and lash out at you with ragged fingernails, scratching at you like you too would hurt me. Perhaps in some ways you did hurt me, but it was in a good way. It was not in a way that would damage me, you hurt me in a way that would only make me stronger.