Pleasure provokes description; pain, analysis. 
Perhaps because I cannot explain why a thing was beautiful, 
or how it hurt.

A day without you

A day without you is not a good thing.
Nothing so romantic as not being able to breathe.
Turning blue. Choking. Being put on ventilator.
Nothing like that.
It's not starvation. Not like going without lunch
And then wondering why the world looks bloody black.
Why its hard to work, why people I usually like seem infuriating,
Why I'm treating the empty boxes in the kitchen cupboard
As though they stone-pelted my dog.
No, not like that.
It's not hunger in other parts, either. I know how to deal with that by now.

On a day without you, I don't feel inclined to
hang a white flag in my window. The sky doesn't pour tears.
It doesn't feel clammy in my favourite ruined shoes,
I don't shiver with a premonition of pneumonia.
On such a day I don't viciously click through Photos of You,
looking for Her face. I don't expect to find tokens of phantom lovers
While sniffing for you on your cast-aside clothing.
(Your nicer clothing, of course.
Your socks smell of you, but not in a way I want to remember.)

A day without you is not a day spent missing you.
A day without you is only a day at the end of which
I'll wish I could tell you about it—you'd
understand this day better than anyone else I could tell.

I shall practice self-development.

"I've really wanted to read this!" I say, and pick it up.
She says I can have it. I pick it up, reluctantly.

I remember to take it home. Two hours later,
When I'm ready to read, (casting aside all its predecessors)
I proceed to begin. (Skip author's note and, hm, preface)
Midway through the first page, I half-giggle,
and so I pause and think, the writing's quite wry.
In five pages' time, I stop to consider a twist in the tale.
Oh! This is a book which cares about holding my attention!
A chapter later, I have checked my phone again, and
told myself to call my parents in ten minutes.
In five, I recall calls I have not made,
WhatsApp buzzes to life, my mind stutters over
A sentence it has not read thrice now...for that matter,
The whole paragraph is looking unfamiliar.
And those calls must be made. Dinner cooked.
Bath taken. I wish someone would read it out to me.
Audiobooks are flat and always in the wrong accent.
I cast a doleful look at the four books I still say I'm reading.
And the newspaper. And work.

And on the inside, this:
This time I imagine as entirely my own is peeling away like dead skin, scattering as dust, deserving to be painful but I haven't the sensitivity.  If each moment were a coin pouring into a vault and I in it, I could suffocate in anticipation. So what if this eight-hour long book will soften several thousand hours to come? Perhaps I will find a summary on the internet.