You told me everything
Bella Levenshteyn
So I’ll tell you:
I am full of wonder
Love and gratitude
For your multitudinous yous
Your charming you
Your depraved you
You back against the wall you
Your effervescent you
Your so so so sad you
Your Petrachan you
Your premonitory you
Your blank stare you
Your darling-and-you-know-it you
Your incandescent you
Your frozen you
Your hobbled you
Your lithe you
Your skipping on the sunny side of the street you
Your Rodin’s Thinker you
Your eidetic you
Your Germanophilic you
Your shtetl you
Your undone you
Your insomniac you
Your prone-to-sit-on-the-café-bathroom-floor-with-me you
Your Five Wonderful Precepts you
Your Liquid Cocaine you
Your self-demeaning you
Your Kuch Kuch Hota Hai you
Your wanderlust you
Your sultry you
Your wavering you
Your take no shit you
Your ne plus ultra you
Your vatic you
Your voluptuous you
Your sattva you
Your polyglot you
Your playful you
Your up every morning at 5:07 am you
Your tongue-tied you
Your volubly remorseful you
Your carrying your new vocabulary notebook everywhere you go you
Your penchant-for-yellow you
Your anaphoral you
Your wallflower one minute and impresario the next you
Your Sunday New York Times all morning you
Your on a Hannah Arendt reading binge for the next four weeks you
Your “I’m starting Tai Chi this year and I mean it” you
Your gastronomy über alles you
You chortling you
Your tears flavoring the borscht you
Your carpe fucking diem you
That was the longest lunch I’ve ever had
Five hours and it felt like five minutes
–from mishmash novel-in-progress, Our Heroic and Ceaseless 24/7 Struggle against Tsuris
