In my imagination there is no key I know of under your doormat, no white sheets we hang together on the dry line. The veil never meets my scalp, vows fail to form at our lips; death need not do us part. Instead, we are actors performing what real lovers do: hands grazing, eyes locked, sitting shoulder to shoulder on the shaky wooden stools in a Manhattan sports bar. Tuesdays is our ritual: we rendez-vous on the green benches in Washington Square Park. You, my confidante, I, your vault. But when the curtains close and the lights come back on we step out of our costumes and go our separate ways. All the world’s a stage and us, merely are the players. After all, I do not know you— your coffee order your mother’s name the incident from childhood that left a scar on your right eye; I do not feel you in the ways drunk poets write of and asylum goers describe. In between us remains the infinite chasm (between likeness and love) drawn by a single thread line. But in my imagination, every so often we veer off script and blur the lines. All the world’s a stage but when I step off you remain on my mind. After all, I know you— the shift of your voice when you anger what makes you laugh, the ways you lie. In my imagination I feel you in the ways electricity runs through fluorescents screens, and the neon signs flashing in a taxi cab, as if norepinephrine and ambien were running through my veins as if we never left the play and kept pressing rewind. But when I awaken from my foolish day dream I face reality’s sobering cruelness: Your blonde from a Good Home, awaits you in your living room adorned in a cotton summer dress. She cooks like your mother and reminds you of the seas. She loves you like a lover does She knows nothing of me. As the curtains close once more and we go about our separate days I think of you as just a stranger; perhaps we were always better off that way.
R. Rizvi is an aspiring freelance writer and award-winning poet. She was a finalist in the New York Times 2017 Found Poetry contest and competed nationally in the 2018 Muslim Interscholastic Student Tournament for spoken word. When she is not writing, she can be found listening to jazz, reading, and making matcha.