Dear Writer,

When you told me memory was another word for excess, I told you when you love someone as I do, there is nothing extra about it. So you told me about slow, casually, as if I wouldn’t know what slow meant if I had it tattooed to my body. But I am bulbous, and I cannot be distracted from looking. About my body recording another’s vice? I am unexcited, and why, anyhow, would I do this when I have more than enough myself? Try again. I am insufferable even amongst my friends who are similar to me.

I do not know how to extract myself, which you know. My couches are as much for others as they are places of longing. The looseness of me is that I excite only for her and too often.

About quotients: there is something that keeps me. Their relationship to might and chemistry. To imagining the shape of mania if she never looked back--I mean the colors and depths and sounds of it, how my own girlish chins and circular knees would dance down, crashed.

What I do know about is movement. Her leftover pieces of hair, the shadows from her eastbound eyes, the scratches over her pinky toes. I pay attention to every detail because I have trained myself to be an unaesthetic lover. My decree is to love only, up-end lullabies. I memorize each mound and scar, each molecule as it leaves her face and comes back to it, weaved in another form.

I know she thinks about me, and meanwhile, in my head, I know whom I will settle for. (Nobody.) I am how I imagine food feels as it is being eaten. My love runs out of me towards, trips over, stops up, filling out her loveliest corners.

Obsession