supermoon

Why the supermoon brought her to me, I don’t know. The last two nights, a huge yellow shortbread cookie in the sky, full and hanging in the sign of Scorpio as if foreshadowing Saturn’s journey there. The closest and largest-appearing moon of 2012, that’s how the supermoon got its name.

The Sun is in Taurus now, right at its center, and I asked for many new gifts when the new moon came weeks ago. A cup waiting to be filled. And then she arrived, arrived on my terms, to tell me one more time before leaving that she still loves me. 5 years after our breakup.

I don’t react at first, I like seeing her, she doesn’t drain me at first. Not that much. Just listens and asks questions about my medical work. I steer the conversation away from our families, who matter less and less to us as we age; we care less and less about their approval and anyway I want to discuss freedom, not disappointments. Not demands from the external world. That was yesterday, not today, I say. There are reasons for my distance from my sisters.

I am calm and almost indifferent, I know this woman. She is leaving the country, and I weigh my attachment to her. Decide I can play with my unfeelingness, let her kiss me as she wants to. She spends one night, then the next. She tells me that she thought about me when she was alone. That she had liked it.

After we make love five years into our breakup, she asks if I still love her. Yes, I say, but am I in love?

The first night in three nights I sleep alone, I place a cushion the size of a small coffee table under my legs, lying face up. My posture better without company, at least tonight. The dollar is about to collapse, she says, that’s why she’s leaving. I wonder at the nature of our love, the fatedness of it. How we even look similar, her Mayan blood and my Bengali, her African and my Afghan bones.

The two sides of me struggle together, intent upon their conversation. The meeting necessary because I feel my soul following her abroad, recalling the need I heaved upon her when she was my closest lover. She was 28 and I only 24 then, fighting to survive among the other female college students who were as ambitious as they were penniless. She and I had become fast lovers then, immersing ourselves in the creative, destructive ecstasy of young women in love.

In the same instant, I consider the long roots feeding me here, reaching, uncompromising, into the earth of this place that becomes more and more strange to me after the ten years I spend here. Are they deep enough to feed me after the dollar collapses? I remember my desire to leave for Brazil. The plans I made until…I am too grounded here. A little immobile. And now this.

© 2012 Tahminah Zaman