A love affair, pt. 1

by Keith Miller

She could not possibly know how much I loved her. As my hand wiped across her sweat drenched back, still unsure of her name, she would not have imagined that she was everything I could dream of; that in that moment all I had ever wanted was her and she was the fulfillment of so many distant desires. I felt not only passion for her lips but a profound necessity for them and for all they implied. But that was all unknown to her. To her this was nothing more than a chance encounter, enhanced and maybe even created by a few glasses of Bushmills. It was an almost hopeless attempt to fill a certain emptiness, to tame a nagging and warm sensation which always seemed unavoidable. She could not know that for me she was love and I could know certain things either. I could not have known that I wasn¹t quite funny enough for her. That I wasn¹t quite strong enough for her. I could never have suspected that I was, in so many senses, less than she wanted. And I could almost never thank her enough for forgiving me, if only temporarily, all those inadequacies.