reminiscing

Searching for something else entirely brought me a note I'd sent in 2009, to a love long lost. I don't know why I'm copying it here. Nostalgia, perhaps.

He sits with me and sips tea on the couch. I've sat on this couch, curled up on it, lain full-length upon it, and never once seen it. Is it chintz? Brocade? Leather? Glossy, or has the gloss rubbed off over a thousand scuffs of virtual hands, and feet, and other parts?

I don't know. But it's in the back of my mind when I talk to him.

We've sat and eaten cookies on it. We've shared tea--I always assume mine is Earl Grey or Darjeeling, something that wreathes my head in fragrant steam, but who knows, really? We've looked out upon a distance, so I assume, in this virtual space, there's at least one window.

We have cuddled on it. He has held me down while I writhed underneath him, in the grip of sweeping ecstasy. He has held me tightly in his arms, unwilling to let me go; and these nights, I am equally unwilling to leave. He has held me, face hidden, shuddering, stroking my hair as I cry in his lap, weeping from some pain or slight.

It is a comfort to me, this place that is no place. This couch, this virtual structure of...what? Wood? Bone? Metal?

Why does what it's made of--when it's just a mental construct, a 'place' to share experience--why does it matter? But my mind worries at it.

In the end, it's just a place, familiar, known, even if I don't know the specifics. It's that place between us, what we've made, him and I, the midpoint in our walk towards each other. Important, in its own way, but--just a place.

Plaid? Vinyl? Chinois bamboo and leaves? What is it made of? Why do I care?

Maybe it's just the trivia of it all. I can worry at this, where I can't worry about anything else. Maybe that's okay, too. The small thing, the thread in the weave I can puzzle over.

Likely, he'd just hand me a cup of tea and smile. "Deal with it."

So I will. Feet tucked under me, sipping Earl Grey, looking out at lights on water. Hey, if it's partially my virtual space, then I have a say in what I see, don't I?

Save for the couch is his. So I still don't know what it's made of.

That was where it ended. I'm not going to comment much on it past that. Surprisingly, it causes very little pain, just a very distant ache. At this point, perhaps that's all that's left, and all that will be.