i could wait all day for you. i do. i wait months. i try to reassure and reassure but you won't take it. It is as if we are children again playing badminton and you won't volley the ball over the net out of some sense of precocious pride and you being you, will sulk and pout a while until we can make it up, make love with the sound of the cool spring rain slapping hard against the windows of the loft. The loft.

The loft with the big mirror you like, where you are now. I can see you there, imagine you there, lying on the bed with a book perhaps, one light on as the sounds the city come in through the window, as you allow yourself those few cigarettes (stress you say, but really, you just like it).

So you ar reading and trying to forget about all of this, about us. Are you trying to undo all that has been done or are you thinking of leaving us, me, in the past or present past -? We said since childhood we would never split. No matter what, we were blood - cosanguinous - and nothing could come between we two cousins, no matter how "unnaturally close" they thought us. Nothing. Ifwe could not marry, that was okay, but we would still see each other. And we do and it is all that is good and right and not some cheap affair, likely because it has been going on for as long as you or I can remember - i don't remember a time when it was not you. When i was not in love with you. It is a blur of hazy days in the orchard, lazy days with you, days of summer idleness and being with you - you're angry and i don't even know why and it scares me. IT scares me because i know you and i know you - i know you'd not want to go and i know that if you did not feel my love, you would go... and these days, you tell me how i do not love you. YOu are certain of this, unequivocal. You are wrong. So very, very wrong.

Do you hear me? I am playing for you a song, Bach, Partita No. 2 in g. major - i call out to you -- echo back. This distance is too far.

~ Asa.

this does not exist, do i exist for you?

You want to know who I am?
I am the girl with one sock down,
the other up.
The shy girl you hardly see in the corner.
The sigh that parses the barrier of your lips.
I am the tongue-tied aphasic who stands close, yet still
afraid to move, just waiting, hoping you'll...
I am the steady silence. I am the ellipsis....
The dot dot dot. I am the hungry ghost: who am I to
rattle her chains, the sound of which you fill with domesticity -
I remain the one with whom you once you spoke a shared dialect, an ellipsis
at the end of every sentence and in that ellipsis a blank space
a meaning and only we knew what it meant.
You wrote, “I missed you.” I missed you too. Shit, that was inconvinient.
Yet still. In this I saw no sin, only sweetness.
These days, you just miss. There is no ellipsis, only this.
Why I have ceased to exist!
What a gas...
Some unexplained change: you leave me an orphan,
your saucer-eyed widow, lost in a sea of black-serifed letters
only the words not quite the same.
So no sous-silence.
Perhaps after all this there is no sans issue.
You should know that every single thing you gave:

a note, a card, a book a film, a jar of honey, a paper
with the inky slant of your pen and which bears my name -
I never discarded even one. Each is bound, tucked away with a photo
of your hand, between the thin, gold-tipped pages
of my rare Tennyson; top-shelf, precious,
and the honey-jar, now empty, is full with polished green-marbles.

No, you never said any of it had meaning.
It was me that did that: she of faith: I read your letters and in them I believed.
My misguided self - I showed to you the shy, the real me,
let slip the dark veneer, the black shades and I was there before you,
trusting all you that you said. Such was my great ontological leap -
pure philosophical faith.
I jumped – i did not skip, no petit-saut..
Perhaps you see Jezebel and threat. Funny that.
When all I wanted was this… perhaps....christ, even....
I trusted you this much. We already had our secrets.
Unspoken, ours for the keeping. I belived. You believed.
I had faith in you every faith, thought you the same of me.
So this explains my token gifts, you should know:

The small bound book, the hand-wrought chair,
wrapped and hand-tied with my hair-ribbon, a small piece of me –
I offered myself up and you took it. And after, just a day, mere 48 hours,
you told me This meant nothing when just a few months prior
we had agreed, you had said, over a long-distance wire:
Yes, we were more than just ‘ordinary friends.’
God, such relief this.
Now, you have taken away the sweetness.
You occupy the Now – I don’t know how.
For all I thought I knew, I now know nothing.
For 8 words defined, for letters read, saved, yours written:
You once wrote “I thought I knew… did I understand about the hands….
I thought I did… but then I…. did i?”
I wrote back: "Absolutely: Resolutely:"
I say the same to you now.
You see what you want: a red-lipped whore.
I am no longer your shy, gamine girl of yesterday -
No frightened, backward lover I -
All I ever wanted what was what you -
what I - could never quite say, speak or spell -
instead it lay within the language of a kiss.
I knew this.
Imagined you did.
I revisited my virtue. Agonized; analyzed.
Knees red-raw, I prayed to some god I was not certain I believed in.
All I wanted...a thing for the self. I am not greedy.
All then, you and likewise, to give.
Maybe not what you thought.
It was a symbol: a thing wrapped, tied neatly
and with my hair ribbon, given over wordlessly, shyly.
And only when alone; forever unspoken. always understood.
Held safe; the way I keep the everything
you give, a hushed secret, untold, wrapped tight, furled –
All I found was an affirmation of all that I believed:
An affirmation of all you tell me that now never was.