Let go, let flow

She felt used. Not as used as someone forced to sell her body might feel, nor as used as someone who is raped, so clear and final. But used in a simple transactional way. She never expected to face one so seemingly mentally liberated. His truth was in theory, rather than praxis. She saw how certain relationships were truncated, punctuated and abated before they began. Power was taken, not given and moments could be misinterpreted or reinterpreted to fit the context. He apologized, and like a slap to the face she closed the jar that held her heart and returned it to its rightful place. She had taken it out the previous day to test its vulnerability and carefully, like her fathers false teeth, she had picked it up, just to see. He apologized and she knew that like when her mother said 'don't worry' only then was it time to worry. Sorry. She didn't want to ask for what. Her stupidity glared into her eyes like the midday sun. Sorry - for what? He compared her to someone else as if reassuring himself that women of her caliber came along often. She smiled, maybe they do, but he didn't know her completely. For a moment she separated the physical from the emotional. She maintained that some unquantifiable connections are not lost but held in a fluid space between where the hand touches the surface of a marble and the time it takes to lose yourself in a city. For a moment, she wondered if she had used him, to remind herself she was not alone. Bodies placed next to one another, hands interwoven. Sheltered. All the bodies and hands she had relied upon were in disparate lands. She would have to learn to hold her own hands.