Who is he?

This man I only know up close.

Does he know me? And if so,

who is this woman, this me he knows?

We have an odd situation, he and I, like a fantasy played out on a stage,

a performance, a curtain call and

then done.

I know the up-close, the heat, the physical

Yet when I see him from a cool distance,

I don’t know him.

He becomes someone else with someone else.

So which is the real him and can he be one without the other?

When I ask him, he hesitates as if to say he doesn’t know what to say or

what I want to hear and so he leaves.

When he goes, what is left?

A space, a place holder, a thought,

another time, another place, a different now?

I know for us there is still only the now.

A now only for us.

But when the physical distance is gone, we two become one but with no future

with or without each other.

It is an isolating togetherness, just ours alone now and forever.

He steps out of his life and I out of mine and together we share a space that

 is comforting, predictable but out of place.

 A place that feels right, until it doesn’t, and I step back into the cool distance of my life.

To a place where I only know this man, up close.