I miss you.

-----------------------

I hate breaking hearts.

My mother, whose heart I have broken several times, whose voice and touch will never leave me, tolerates this the best of anyone I know. She clings and cries and for this reason I never want anyone to get this close to me, to scrape away my skin and to look inside of the hollow cavity of my chest and sob: please, your heart looks just like mine.

I remember the cold quiver of one boy's voice on the walk to a sushi restaurant. He remarked, surprised, that I was shorter than he had remembered. This meant I was less intimidating than he remembered. We said little that day, for lack of interest or for a heart full of nervousness or for the slow comprehension that nothing would ever work out between us. His speech fell thinly on my ears, too soft, like water trickling down the edge of a raincoat: his words fell into the cracks of the concrete sidewalks.

Driving back he mentioned that he was writing some music. He was better at song than at words. He asked if I would like to hear it, and I responded more enthusiastically to this than any of his other requests--this would prevent him from trying to talk--and we sat awkwardly on the sidewalk with his braces obstructing his words and his hands slowly merging into his guitar, chords and chords melting into one another. His voice cracked at the high note. His hands unmerged and fumbled. I smiled and bid him goodbye, and felt his heart cracking in mine.

He was the first boy to fall in love with me in all of my bitter, postmodernist anger, in my vitriol and my obsession with learning and beauty and how it all betrayed me. I don't know why he did. I did not think I was a beautiful person.

Now I see the pain of lust and loneliness pleading with me, pleading for a drunken respite from a daily misery, for the immediacy of contact, for warmth. I know their hearts look like mine. I want to help, somehow, if I could.

But I can't. You're waiting for me in my mimosa grove, and I know I want to return.

But that mimosa grove--the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since.