A cactus grows there now, in the kintsugi planter I carefully picked out years ago, planning to give to you for some event or another. I think it was Christmas, or maybe it was just because no one had ever made me feel the way your kisses had. I spent hours coming up with the most intimate, meaningful, perfect gift I could imagine. It’s so out of character that I chickened out on giving it to you. That’s how I know you were never meant to be mine.
You were renovating a house and the way you let me in on your progress, your design choices, gave me little micro doses of what being your actual partner would feel like. “I think I’ll go with gold hardware with this blue in the kitchen,” you would say, hesitantly, as if my opinion of this home neither of us would live in mattered. That’s what it was, then. It was meant to be a housewarming gift. I wasn’t sure if the olive or the turquoise would look best in the living room where the big window faced east, so I bought them both from a potter on Etsy. I could barely afford one, along with specialty potting soil and volcanic rock that should have nourished the black pine seedlings I chose after weeks of meticulous research on what made the best types of bonsai.
Bonsai for your love of Japan and your time spent there, for the stories I loved hearing you tell. Black pine for our shared roots in the land of the longleaf, which wouldn’t have made a good bonsai. I bought ten seedlings and planted them in little plastic pots first, trying to get them to take hold and root. (I’m never sure what I’m doing with plants so I borrowed an expression my Granny used to say.) They lived alongside me, across the state from their intended destination, for months. February and March, when you still made time to see me, when my body still understood what yours needed. April, when I ached for your touch. May, when I made plans to spend my next birthday with another man. They finally withered away in June, a year after we first met.
The roots became soggy from too much of the wrong kind of attention. Maybe I should have let them dry out a bit. Maybe I should have been less eager to show you how much I cared for you. Maybe I should have given you the bonsai and kintsugi.
We only had one fight, if it could even be called that, on your birthday the year before. You were late, with a miscommunication about why that turned on my aggressive, fiery indignation. I still have no idea how that made you feel. Did you feel guilty? Excited? Exhausted by my sudden shift in emotions? I was in a beautiful floral and lace bodysuit with a plunging vee, a silky robe on top. I had planned to take you out to eat (again, I had researched every restaurant in a 5 mile radius so you could have exactly what you craved) but you were worn out and ate fast food on the way while I grabbed a Snickers bar and half split of wine from the hotel market after I realized I’d be skipping dinner. Despite my anger, all I wanted was you. The way your sheepish smile and quiet “I’m sorry" calmed me down, how you took your shoes off in a way I’d seen people do hundreds of times before but looked special from you, like a pre-makeout ritual. Being with you was the opposite of every other relationship I’ve had; when we were out in the world I felt unsure of you, detached, as if we were two aliens of the same species that had never met but recognized some piece of home in one another even if we couldn’t name it. Behind the closed doors of a hotel room, though, we were the only humans that existed, every single part of our bodies and brains intertwined around the other. I had never had a drug this addictive.
Even now, over two years later and two years into a relationship with someone else, with that man I spent my birthday with after you slowly retracted from my life, I’m wide awake knowing we’re on the same side of the state but still just out of reach, a safe enough distance for you, a brutally close reminder for me. “Have stormy dreams,” you told me. But now I’m the one who can’t sleep.
