You Is All I Want

Happy Valentine's Day!!!!

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 "You Is All I Want"

Michael Lujan Bevacqua

2011

The waitress at Coco’s is happy

I am not.

She sashays to my table as if she has just stolen the sunshine of everyone in the room and beams at me with her conquest

I am not in the mood for anything.

I miss you, and it is the kind of missing that makes you feel like something is pushing your heart through your chest, giving it the sense of being released and set free as it is being choked to death by the bars of your rib cage.

As the song says, there ain’t no sunshine when you’re gone, and every sunny soul makes me wish I was some cartoonish DC universe villain, with a ray-gun that would suck out your happy soul and then stab you in the eye with a spork afterwards.

The waitress leans over and asks me, smile stuck between her teeth,

“What do you want today?”

I look at her wishing I was the protagonist of a movie and so when I glare, extras jump, cameras zoom, the soundtrack smashes onto the floor.

I want my eyes to tell her that her soul is now mine, but instead she just keeps smiling.

“Do you really want to know what I want?”

The smile cracks a bit, she instinctively steps back, looking to her sides to make sure she’s not being filmed and then responds “of course darlin, that’s what I’m here for.”

I don’t even look at her as I speak,

“I want my girlfriend sitting right next to me, her body bent and tucked under my outstretched arm over her shoulders.

I want her to fold her fingers in mine and every once in a while lift our co-creation to my lips and kiss them.

I want to be able to grab her hair, mixed red and brown, and lift her head up, and savor the moment of decision between kissing or biting her neck.

I want her next to me so that the Ipod shuffle of love songs in my head doesn’t taunt me anymore like a mixed tape for a failed or absent love.

I want her beside me so that every random, errant engram of love and desire finds flesh, finds some life and that if the mood should somehow arise she can be the object of whatever ridiculous Matchbox 20 song is the momentary metaphor for my love.

I want her next to me because while she does complete me, better yet she complicates me.

She is so frustrating, she makes everything worth it.

She is so crazy, it makes everything matter.

She is what I want now.

If you really want to know what I want right now, that’s it. Can you bring her here, across oceans, thousands of miles and dollars to sit next to me right now?

The waitress pauses, inhaling and rather relishing a safe moment at least to breathe, her face tight, uncomfortably weathered after having survived the storm of my longing.

She smiles, in a way it looks to me like the cutest cat and dog in the world, both being tossed into a sack and then tossed off a bridge into a rushing river below.

There is some cuteness, but what happens next?

“Well I’d love to help you there hon, but that ain’t today’s special.”