Love like a Smile

We’re together in the photograph like we were in bed every night – joined at the waist, smooth faces held close, arms around each other. You’re smiling in the snapshot, but not because you were happy. It’s one of those perfunctory smiles that people make because that’s what you’re supposed to do when someone takes your picture.

I don’t recall your smiling much in the past few years. You did in the earliest days though, whether you were supposed to or not. I remember.

I remember a time when just being here with me made you loose and silly, when pressing my hardness against you transformed your whole petite frame into moist, open smile. I fell into your beauty and persona like a string of meteors caught in a celestial body’s gravity, and you shook with the impact.

You smiled before I opened myself up to you, before you realized what a mistake you’d made in loving me. Before we’d lie in bed without speaking or touching each other, as if death had already separated us.

You smiled before you really knew me.

Now you’ve gone, and I know I’ve been alone all along. And I sit in this blank darkness, surrounded by the dead roses and razor wire you found me in, wishing I could find you – find love – all over again.

Even if it is just an illusion, like the smile in this photograph.