Once

Once I wrote a story about vampires. You read it to me one night. I was spread out on satin sheets; your voice reverberated in the dark - I could feel your fingers kneeding into my back. I still used to write then, and in between kisses, we'd whisper love-poems. In the mornings, we had discussions about gender over coffee. "Eve was created to be Adam's eye-candy", and "I always thought Adam was kind of a douche-bag", our own midrashic musings shouted in between bits of strawberries that got stuck between our teeth, but you were no more than a habit, really: an annoying movement of my body that somehow I had latched on to, the slight grip of my fingers, the licking of the lips, words that became breathing.

Is love no more than that, the sum total of time we spend together, minus the amount of time we spent apart? Cold calculations like your physics homework - I always thought our relationship was more like warm water, soft, and flowing, but it left my hands chapped when I had finished the dishes - your dishes.

Your fucking dishes. Me, the feminist, re-enacting a scene from some sort of 1950s movie. Now that's love baby - politics be damned! Put your hands a little higher, a little higher - I can almost feel the breaking of the glass.