Another sad fiction (or me writing as a guy)

The fabric tears away in my palm. Cotton and lace, tears and sighs. The threads and fibers remember it all. The way you danced all night in the fog and smoke, the way you dropped to the wide pine floorboards and swam on your back over wood and nail to where I sat watching. You climbed into my lap, dust and dirt and glitter falling from your hem, your hair. You smiled as I have never seen you smile. I always think like that and you always surprise me with the next round of smiling. 
Until you didn’t anymore.   
Until like the ripped sheaves of patterns falling away in my grasp you slipped farther and farther away. Your smile receded like the bay tides over sandbars and through narrow channels, under bridges, scraping the shore of anything sparkling or precious. I am drowning now in that current of your frowns and unease. But then I knew I wanted to be swept along with whatever you were laughing about. It made me happy to see you happy and you knew this and I knew this and that is where the problem lay. You lied about your happiness and I could feel it seeping out between the cracks in your smile, the spaces dark and mucousy between your teeth. You tried to hold it back. You told me we could try harder, hold on longer. Just get through to next spring or summer or fall and then we would get on track again, find each other again. 

You would slip across the floor in another delicate dress, this one silk and linen, black instead of cream like a wedding gown. You would slide towards me on bruised knees and cut up hands. You would hold my head between calloused fingertips and tell me not to cry. 
I didn’t even know I was crying. 
You have that power over me, pulling water and salt and fear from glassy windows I can barely see out of for all the glare of the brilliance of you. How can you tell me these things when we both don’t mean it? You say the words but it might as well be me. But we both know that you mean them less. You said so with the corner of your lips turning towards brown earth. 

The dress you wore is in my hands brittle and giving. It held many more stories than you had to give it. We wandered through those stories with reverence, sitting hand in hand on a picnic bench underneath an Oregon moon, wrapped in wool and wonder, talking into the night of recycled atoms and past lives of found objects. Your story seeps from the seams and joins mine as they fall to the ground and dissolve into the pale gray dirt.