What having a lover is like:

There is not a collection of words that will ever tell that warmth. And the warmth is not a temperature. It can be the coldest day, the coldest room and a blanket too flimsy and still she feels warm.

There is not a collection of details: height, weight, skin colour, eye colour, hair colour, that describes him and says what it is like.

His voice: When he says her name it is like walking into the bakery and smelling all the pies. She can’t help smiling. But how could she describe his voice: Tabla drum and cello?

(When she first met him it was as if some unnamed hope shot out of her, reached the limits of the known and pieced the skin of the impossible, flew back and hit her with the force of a meteor and left her standing in front of him babbling and blushing. She had been clever once.)

It might be described as the sound of his footsteps on the back stair as he comes home and the welcome space she makes for him in the bed beside her, (not asleep because she has been waiting for him); the chill pocketed in his clothes, which he still has on, merging with the humidity of her own naked body; the effort that makes them both laugh to have all of his clothes off without him having to leave her bed.

It might be how he gives up the ridiculous and sits on the edge of the bed to undress and how she watches him pull his shirt off, his pants off and last, his socks: Always the socks are last.

“Boyfriend” was so pedestrian sounding. Having a boyfriend was something you talked about endlessly with your friends and them to you: whether you had one, wanted one, wanted to lose one, wanted someone else’s, or someone else wanted yours… The permeations were seemingly endless!

But this is singular. This is lonely. This is lonely in a way she had never known before, in a way that makes her desperate and crazy. Where was he when he was not with her? How could he leave her alone for so long? Why wasn’t he answering her calls?

When she sees him arm in arm with another woman and her co-worker asks her, “Who is that guy anyway?” and she answers: “My lover.”, finally, she realizes, it is the feeling that, on a busy street, causes a sound to come out of her, unwanted and unbidden, of anguish.