I’ve been carrying around the memories of you and I together like a security blanket. I clutch them tightly to my chest for a small bit of comfort in the face of unfamiliarity and every night they keep me warm in bed. I am not naive enough to believe there was an us, that what we had was more than a few stolen private displays of affection in between real relationships and lovers. Our kisses will slide down the drain of a leaking faucet and be forgotten, leaving no ripple in the ocean of experiments with love. Even still I interlace my fingers and try to make them fill that space the way yours did. I shuffle my feet across the same floorboards in the room of loves lost. Our touches are printed in braille on the stucco wall and I try to memorize them with my fingertips, running them back and forth until they lose all sensation. I start to forget what it felt like to feel through my back your heartbeat syncing with mine as we spooned. Just as the kitties on a child’s blanket became too faded and dirty to recognize, the memories are starting to get fuzzy. Although I know that we spent ten hours without ever leaving your couch one day, the memory is tattered. I’ve lost the capability to vividly recollect the pitch of your voice when you told me I was beautiful. I used to be able to close my eyes and feel the electricity at every point your body met mine while we cuddled but now I have carelessly dragged these memories through the mud of everyday life, day after day.

I should have saved them for special occasions, put them under a bell jar up on a shelf to admire from a far. Then I could take them down when I need them and find them flawless, protected from dust and still with a fresh coat of paint. I didn’t do this. I dragged the memory of our first kiss out everyday and wore it like a pair of shiny new black patent maryjanes, pulling the buckles tight to get the support and confidence I now expected everyday and in time it wore out. The patent got scuffed and the straps loosened even at their tightest notch.

I can not be sorry because each taste I savored of our encounters assuaged any worries I had during a time when everything was wonderful, but scary and unfamiliar. I learned that the most romantic gesture of a fantasy does not compare to the realizing of a tiny piece of affection. If all that remains is this frayed and worn out scrap leftover from a exquisite quilt of memories, it will be enough. The beauty is not lost even as it lays in tatters.

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