Distance to me

Every day for the last few months, spare a few days, I get a text or a phone call from a woman that I love saying how much she loves me. How much I mean to her, how hot I am, how incredible the sex and passion is, how she wants to come see me for a few minutes just to kiss my aching lips and smell my chest.

Every day.

Every day she does my heart breaks more and more because she is someone I would love to be with, and someone I can't. Because she is married.

Every day I yell at myself over my impulsive soul, and my heart that can't beat without the spark of love to ignite it. I choke away tears under tinted safety goggles and the shade of my hardhats brim, praying one doesn't free from my eyelashes and claim a streak down my rusty cheek. "So it is Joe, so has it been and so shall it be" I tell myself. "You aren't good enough for a great woman, the ones you meet are crazy, they must be, and thus so fated your romance." I pull on my worn, cracked leather gloves and pour water from my bottle onto my face to both cool the fury of the sun and hide the tears that I no longer care to restrain.

Every day I check my emails and texts and call log. Every day I hope that one of the resumes I turned in will perk someone's interest in me, or a friend has a story to share or an invite to grab a beer or Pho. Every day, spare a few, I have none but the ones from this forbidden love. This love that feels as pure no MORE pure than anything I have felt before. It's understanding, non-judgmental, nurturing, and tragic. I type things sweet to reply, and each time I choke because with each passing second this horribly beautiful bond grows stronger.

Every day I hate myself for not saying no to her, and ever day I am glad I didn't. I won't run from the nuclear repercussions that erupt even now. But I stay for her, because I need this as much as she does. In the sickest way I want, more than anything, for her and her husband to find the passion her and I have and live a long, happy life together. In the sickest way, I want to be that stolen memory in sin of two separated lovers who had found each other when it was too late. In the sickest way I want her to reach across her skin at night in between a dream the way I do, thinking not of what we have done but countless ways and things we could have. In the sickest way I want her to stop breathing when she thinks of me the way she did when I would kiss her lower lip.

Every day I want to take my mind from her so I can heal myself and forgive myself for committing treason on my morality. I want to find and nurture the truest love with a woman and entwine it into my eternity, two souls bound together by their spiritual thread for time and space and love. Every day I drive home to an empty condo and wish with all I have that I cold open my door to something I can have, and see that woman I may or may not have met yet smile at me with the light of the galaxy in her eyes and ignite every nerve in my body when she gets up from her show, or book and just hugs me.

Every day the guys who wear hats similar to mine, and who have hid their tears under their shades call me a fool. Every passing day I believe them more.