I Want to be a Sponge for You

I miss you so much that I imagine my mouth as a jar and my hands as hungry spoons- not violent, not theatrical, just earnest and sticky. I want to fold you into me the way sunlight folds into old paper: slowly, insistently, until there is no edge left between your shape and mine. I mean it like a lesson in absorption. I mean it like a science experiment gone tender, place everything in contact and wait. I say this and you are not even gone, you are right here, wherever that may be.

Sometimes I dream I am a kitchen sponge with a human face. I sit on the windowsill and watch the rain run like tiny fingers across the glass, and I think about how sponges are porous so they are already composed of absence. You are a mess of warmth and punctuation and secret commas; I want to press my pores to your punctuation and drink the syllables out of you. I want to be full of you until I cannot hold any more meaning without leaking it like tea.

But there is a cleanliness to sponges before use that I miss, a white square of possibility. Once a sponge has been used, it smells like everything it has ever touched. To absorb you completely would mean I would become saturated with you: your jokes, bright as little marbles; your grief, heavy as wet cloth; your promises, sticky like jam on the plate. I do not want to be filthy in a moral sense, but I crave the filth of intimacy, the way two atoms feel when they finally decide to stay together and never be separate again.

I imagine swallowing your laugh whole and afterwards tasting it in the back of my throat for days. I imagine threading your tiny habitual hesitations through my veins like beads, stringing them into a necklace, wearing you close and then smelling you in my sleep. I think of digestion in purely aesthetic terms, not a butcher’s work, more like a composer rearranging notes. I would take your chorus and rearrange it into lullabies for the parts of me that have always been hungry.

There is a catalogue in my head, a small, ridiculous inventory: one mark along your spine, one half-finished joke you keep telling, a bracelet you lost two weeks ago (do you remember? It's not lost, just in my bag), the exact way you fold into a sentence and leave fingerprints on the margins. I line them up like coins and pass them over my tongue to test if they are real. They are. They are all real, and my tongue is a miserly archivist.

But to consume everything is to become an archive that cannot be opened. Imagine a sponge so full it begins to slough off the things it holds, a leakage of memories that smells sweet and wrong. I do not want to be landfill for your ghost. I want to be a library where you can still borrow yourself back, not a cupboard that closes and keeps you for good. I want to absorb and then offer back, cleanly, like a lent item wrapped in tissue paper, not like some greasy, sentimental relic.

There are times I picture myself rinsing in a sink under a faucet that is too far away. Water is the possible redemption. Water is the thing that says you can be clean again. I dunk myself, frantic and clumsy, and the water only makes the colors run. Your laugh bleeds into the suds. My resolve floats like a paper-boat and capsizes. I want to be empty enough for more of you to fit, but it seems every time I empty I find another version of you lodged in the corner.

Sometimes I invent metaphors as a kind of prayer. If I could be cheese, I would mature under your breath. If I could be a book, I would be annotated by your fingers until my margins were full of your handwriting. If I could be a tree, I would press all your days into my rings so that anyone who cut me down could read you like a hidden language. These are childish, extravagant wishes, but my heart is a child that has learned the wrong words for patience and insists on shouting them anyway.

The idea of being dirty terrifies me and excites me in exactly the same proportion. Dirt is an honest thing. Dirt is proof of contact. If I am dirty with you, I can point to the stain and say, here, see? Here is evidence. But then what? Evidence is only a thin consolation. It doesn't make the thing return. It doesn't make the thing stay inside in the neat, orderly way I crave. The stain is both a map and a prison.

You are soft in the memory like bread gone warm. I want to tear you apart and mash you into a new loaf and feed it back to myself, because I think eating is the most intimate thing possible, it is making a person part of you in a literal way- but I do not mean it with teeth or with horror. I mean it like a ritual of borrowing. I take, I integrate, I am indebted. Afterward I would do the dishes. I would scrub the platters until the soap made us both smell clean and ridiculously domestic.

Sometimes the thought of being full scares me because fullness implies no room for other things. If I become nothing but you, what becomes of my small, ridiculous hobbies- sticking trash to walls and calling nostalgia, collecting the wrong receipts in a shoebox, the way I cry against wind and rain? I fear losing those odd shelves in the cupboard of me. I fear that being too complete with you would make me brittle, a cookie that snaps at the slightest pressure.

The truth is I am greedy and careful in equal measure. I want to be full of you and still be my own furniture. I want to be the house that hosts you and refuses to collapse. I imagine pressing my face into your name and inhaling like someone trying to smell winter. I imagine you pressing back, not with fear but with the slow, patient generosity of someone who understands what it means to be wanted without being owned.

So I will sit here with my pockets turned inside out, I will wave them, show you what is left; lint, a coin that isn’t worth much, a receipt for something I don’t remember buying. Come close, but not so close that we melt. Come close, but let us both keep a little distance, like two sponges in a sink that share the same suds but do not fuse. Let us be porous together. Let us be messy and careful.

And if, sometime, we are both filthy and full and laughably impossible, then we will learn how to wring each other gently, and then how to dry in the light, and then how to do the dishes.