The Spaces Between

"I taste you and I realize I've been starving."


A sentiment I'd written inside the dust cover of an old book from an old lover. I came across it the other day while cleaning out a bookshelf. Separating the cheap dime store novels, of which I had an alarming amount of....from the more substantial books I owned. The first editions, the classics.
Books from an old lover. Even some of the dime store romances likely given to me at the pinnacle of our love affair. That time space in any love affair when everything is possible and the idea of your beloved is fuzzy, warm and perfect. When butterflies still flutter in your gut at the thought of them.

Ironically, when I echoed that sentiment with a pen in the flap of the dust cover, it wasn't that particular lover I had in my mind. It was another lover from another chapter of my life. Someone who was always somewhere in my mind. Usually with no real immediacy on most days, weeks, months or even years but he was always.....there. In the abandoned corridors of my mind and in the deepest room of my heart. Not with any epic sentimentality but with a purity. Like a solid stone compass that set me a sail. The starting point in a life. Never really certain I'd return to that shore.


All of the lives lived and lovers loved just the spaces between me and that shore. That one person. That compass.