i am learning to have less sugar in my tea.

there is a beautiful person coming half way across the world to see me. i can hardly breathe when i think of it. so i do not think of it; i have become it. every flicker of muscle whispers his name. he lives inside my eyelids. a turn of my neck or pass of my hand and someone catches me smiling. i wrap myself in his coat, so warm, and know the warmth is not from the fabric but from his being in it. the very air is languid and i am drifting inside it.

but pushed to the back of a closet in a tightly closed box are my fears, is the coiled spring and clenched jaw of waiting. i am afraid i'm not good enough, not pretty enough - as if he will not love me because my tooth is crooked or my bottom lip too full - that he will realise it is all a mistake, that i will be too much and not enough.

and i am bargaining with the universe, i am saying please give me this i want it so much, it would be cruel to let me come so far and snatch it away.

and while i watch the clock and say: this time next week he will be here, another part of me is also whispering deep and insidious: yes and this time in so many other weeks he will be gone and you will be empty then.

and oh and oh and on and on. and love like blood, red and rich with oxygen and iron and life.

i can breathe through the hole in my skin and mine was the knife licked clean.