Miss You
After the affair, we didn’t speak again for two months.
When we saw each other again, he hugged me and whispered in my ear, “Miss you.”
Too stingy to include the I.
Miss you. Like he was a fragment in search of a pronoun.
Miss U! Or he was at a football game rooting for Mississippi State.
Miss You I have just won a beauty pageant in the State of Myself.
So I push him away and say, “That’s Ms. Me to you.”
No I don’t.
He says “Miss you” and my heart goes carousel and jackhammer, because he misses me—or ostensibly, he is the one missing me, at least someone or possibly something misses me and it feels good, the way cold chicken tastes
like steak when you’re starving.
So, I ask myself, what is the least I would settle for? What if he just said “Miss…”
and looked at me pointedly? What if he just pushed out the
“Meh.” Could I scrape
together the missing letters until he missed me in three phantom syllables,
the ghost of my desire to be longed for?
After he leaves, I pull the words from my ear, fold them,
put them
in my purse. I might be hungry later.
-From Ceremony for the Choking Ghost by Karen Finneyfrock
