After me you will have thousands of women... You will taste thousands of loves. But the void in you will endure. It will poison you like venom... And every woman who comes after will bear my face more and more... Until at last they blur into one— a girl precious beyond forgetting! There will be moments when you swear some woman carries my scent... You will dream of me, dream and dream! You will ache for me, hunger for me! Even with thousands of wives... burning through thousands of loves, in their laughter and their eyes you will search for me...Again...and again...
# You Will Look For Me <p>When I am no more, when the light drains from my eyes like water through cupped palms, when my name becomes a date between two parentheses, you will look for me.</p> <p>Not in the places where I lived— those rooms will swallow other shadows, other footsteps will wear the floors smooth. Not in the photographs, though you'll try, searching my frozen face for some last word I failed to speak. You will look for me in silence. In the pause between your heartbeats. In the particular way the afternoon light bends through a window I once stood beside. In a song I hummed without thinking, now lodged in your throat like a stone.</p> <p>You will look for me in your own hands— how they move, how they remember the grammar of touch I taught them without knowing. In the shape of a thought that arrives unbidden, wearing my inflection. You will find me in the spaces between words, in what you choose not to say, in the kindness you show a stranger because I showed it to you once, and it took root.</p> <p>I will be scattered then, a presence without edges, a name that tastes like copper on the tongue, a ghost made not of the dead but of the living— of all the small, ordinary ways I will continue, unmeasured and unending, in you.</p>
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