Unfinished Story for Jeff

I am tired and stressed and have nothing left, so here is a prose poem I started writing for Jeff last year. It's a little personal -- be warned, relatives!

Ahem ...

Once upon a time I fell in love with you on a bridge. Or was it a dance floor, the smooth parquet humming above the generators of the store downstairs, and you sliding across it in your gold-toed socks? Was it when you twirled me on concrete against the backdrop of lower Manhattan and the insomniac lights of Wall Street? When does the story begin? We have had many beginnings, you and I, little paths we scuffed through the muck of that lust that first brought us together. Remember that first sleepless spring when we got stoned and made love and I sat up nights listening to the White Stripes and the Puerto Rican music drifting in from the street? I always say I’ve never seen you cry, but that day I left your apartment for good (we thought), I thought I saw tears threatening to rise, runoff from months of almost-happiness. Maybe those were mine.

Unfinished Story for Jeff