To you, joking, I’d said: You’re an actor.
Act like you love me. You laughed and turned
away into the characters you played, acting like
an actor. We were caught in the force field,
the imagination’s need for analogy, the analogy’s
need for identity. Identity meant self-rescue by
definition though its fierce assumption forged a link,
a twinned longing we’d never admitted between
us, just below the surface of our lives. Something
woke me, night after night—insistent, reverberant—a word
finally understood outside conjuncture: heart. Instead of turning
to you, breathing next to me in the bed, I put my hand on my own
chest, my own pulse. I listened to the hurried beats—thought, afraid,
about the moving phrase of light on the wall that I could not, at that time,
begin to decipher.
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