Near Enough to Burn

There are many things I've started to write in my mind, lately, that never quite made it to any page, paper or otherwise. Feeling more like myself means gathering library books, cooking new things, browsing obsessively for cognac leather boots. I do not want to write about the wedding or the honeymoon, or at least do not want to using those words. It came and blazed and went, and we were elated for it.

I'd like to write about being unable to keep from peeking at the sizes in my mother's blouse, bra and jeans that she left at the reception - not from any illicit activity, but because she helped to decorate and changed into her dress there after wards, accidentally leaving her things for me to gather and ship. She is smaller than I am, in numbers anyway, and I smaller than she in character. She never looked in my diary, after all.

I'd like to write about the false gas fireplace in the second hotel M and I shared, how he turned the television a full ninety degrees so he could sit in front of it, near enough to burn if the flames had been real instead of as far from it as the cotton tatters blown from a plastic Halloween lantern. How this picture of him, his pale body and hairy legs, is the picture of my husband and my greatest delight. His lap did not seem complete without my head in it, his arms empty as anchors dangling without a ship. So I sat with him.

Cheap hotel rooms can really sometimes feel like palaces.