I thought about the morning and waking up for you to see me older and lined perhaps that is why I left your hotel room so early / 3:42 a.m. / I was tired and cold and wanted to get under the covers of your bed but did not want to wake you / perhaps that was too intimate a gesture for what we had done and what we had done was not the intimacy of early mornings or the light of aging faces or a quiet sleep in each other's arms / we accomplished something else of course and I did kiss you on the head and smelled my fingers full of you / and maybe it was better that I left and walked through the yellow-lighted halls of your floor / a renovation in progress / walls half-painted and torn with room numbers taped crookedly onto doors / ceiling lights and wires hanging down claw-like and scraped your nightmare you said / details / you see I remember / I remember how I walked into the elevators wondering if my clothes were all on and zippered and buttoned in case I met someone / I did not meet anyone / even on my already renovated floor / was I now renovated too as I entered my room quietly without lights so as not to wake my sleeping roommate? / as I lay tossing on my bed with the smell of you? / with the fact that I did not come and wanted you again and how starved I must be when I saw you the next day you ompletely distracted me from what I had to do / and now it is two weeks and your package came today and I held it with the rest of the mail against my chest and pushed it up the stairs of the deck with me behind as I might hold your back to my chest and push you forward up and into my house through the living room and onto the bed I am starved / although I do not want to eat / starved when I turned the radio off in the car and felt your head in my lap / starved / when I try to pray my fingers are your fingers on the back of my neck