Stolen Kisses

"Can I have a kiss goodbye?"


She will make an excellent game player, except for the fact that I doubt she'll enter into the games.   "Good", I think to myself, "don't go there", don't play games with people and love.  Don't live that life, don't go towards what feels like life and light.  Stay away from the light/lite, because what's light now is often dark later.  What's lite today becomes heavy in time.
I want to hug her, squeeze her tight and I notice I can't, but I do want to and I remember this feeling.  I remember the desire to  be close from another time, another person I loved, but I can't recall a closeness.  I believe I said to my friend just last night that I cannot remember my relationship with someone to whom I was married, then for hours after I said those words, I tried to justify that reality in my own mind.
Where the hell was it?   Where did that time go, the memory of that time spent together, those interactions, that "stuff", that love?


I pictured a wheelbarrow full of dried leaves.  I imaged myself pushing it downhill fast.   Runing with it easily and as I do, leaves float up and out.  They hit my face, obscure my vision, fly past.  I see them, feel them, taste broken bits of them in my mouth.  I'm amazed by them.  Later I go back up the hill, seek them out, wanting to collect them and keep them, collage them, paste them in a book, because they were beautiful and they somehow seemed to actually belong to me, but I never find them and if I see them I won't recognize them for what they were in those fleeting moments.  They were never mine.  


Loving someone with Asperges is essentially easy, while knowing them seems nearly impossible.   Then again, we've placed men on the moon and they've come back.  


I realize that I'm a lucky person.  I live in the same house with my children.  Only I want to know them both and I can, but not both fully, not all the way... 
I think about these words from that song I love by Frank Sinatra, "If I'm gonna love you, it's for sure I'm gonna love you all the way.   All the way."

I'm going to continue to steel those kisses.   Gonna make her look me in the eyes.  I'm going to step in front of those speeding bullet goodbyes she shoots me.    Hold her tight, hold her gaze, hold her to it.    I'm not going to push this lovely, little stack of colored leaves rapidly down a sleepy, sloping lane and later regret a single, speckled, freckled, fading leaf.  I'm going to love  her - all the way....
And I'm going to teach her that there is no other way to be loved.  


Men walk on the moon.   I'll walk across a distracted heart or two or 3 or...