All the Experience You Were and Are

I remember when you took my hand
and guided me up the stairs to that room
at the back of the library. I had spilled
myself and my anxieties across the
screen of your laptop while you were in class,
typing up a conversation I wanted to have,
but made you read, as I was
too afraid to ask the question out loud:
"Do I need more experience?"
Up in that room, you leaned back
in your chair at the table,
the look of tortured patience
playing across your face.
How you had to know you intimidated me.
Your knowledge, your experience, the ferocity
of your desire for what I was, for what I
held inside me you wanted to be yours.
You had known so many men, and for me all
I had known was my marriage - could I be the
"enough" you had been working toward?
What was "enough", and were you and I
a part of the right narrative -
a narrative in which no other
puzzle pieces were necessary?
Later, before we made love again,
you cried in my arms from the insecurity I had
hurled at you - that being enough was
all you could offer.  That if I needed
something else, or something more,
you would give me up - Oh, such love -
but then, did I want experience... or did I want you?

***

I remember the days after I lowered all
my walls to you.  You had returned to me,
a poor, self-deprecating boy shivering in the
figurative downpour on my front porch,
waiting, hoping, to be brought in out of
the rain, but so afraid to knock on the door.
The deluge was all your own, and I did all
I had ever wanted to do - hold you close to
show you love and protect you from
the pain you held inside yourself.
I remember hearing, or rather reading,
as you retreated back into the textual realm
of your fading existence, the very question
I had posed to the ghosts of my own past:
"Maybe I need new experiences. I don't know."
I was your age when I asked that same question
to the man that had promised me a future,
and whose answer I repeat now.
Because I see myself in you.
Because I understand, so much more than you
would ever let me tell you, as you backed out
and closed door after door after door
only just re-opened,
telling me "not to put [my] life on hold,"
Perhaps not knowing how much those words
carve into the bitter memories of all
the weight and hurt of my past tears,
and signifying to me beyond doubt that you
were going to choose to leave me, again,
for experiences you felt you needed.
And, because I understand, I too can take
the shape of tortured patience and let you go.
Because I understand, I can only hold myself
together and watch you leave, and watch you
grow and live and, I hope to God, find happiness.
But then, again, the haunting question I was asked
so long ago. The question, now, and my response.
"Do you choose experience... or me?"
I chose you, and all the experience you were and are.

"Let the slow hands of time
and the even slower dreams of sleep
consider all the rest."