You Know...that One Time

It must have been a thousand degrees, maybe a million more.  In the dense humid air of the tent the sun was an orb that was moon-shaped against the outline of the tent.  They had awakened to a day in full tilt.

Why had we slept so long?

Because of the evening.

Why had we laid awake, listening to the chirps and harmonies of nightfall...frogs full of throat, crickets attracting others, the whirl of darkened, startled birds...the night sky was exploding above us in such untouched blacks and stars, piercing constellations and the occasional skid of a golden streak of something falling and if we had murmured out loud our wish we would have said the exact same thing...

I wish I was here...
now...
and I wish it would last.

Time was well past dark...and not an hour, but colors.  It was dark, so it must be late...but the stars don't care so neither shall we.  Let's just stay here, unencumbered, touching at hips, arms, maybe at hands...maybe we swipe at a bug that is a nuisance but it's getting cooler so we are slightly moving closer together, inches, increments, trying to stay warm, eyes full of stars, of distance, of a vastness where we understand how minuscule we are but when we are together we are ferocious.

We tire.  It is the comfort of a familiar friend, an intimate...it lets us drop guards, drop our arms.  It lets us reveal, and appreciate and in our vulnerable state we realize that we fill our gaps with a person who fills our gaps.

We grow comfortable.  We clutch.  We pull and tug into each other as if we are each other's blanket...warming, clinging, comforting and consoling...night spilling into our eyes like dark from a dropper, spilled in drips to tire our gaze and slow our blinks.  Comfort...safe...relaxing where our breath is mixed together, the ultimate sign of acceptance and empathy.

Which is why, in the hot warmth of a morning, when the breath is exhaled between the fury of a kiss, when the night clothes have been shed and the eyes may still remain clench-closed but the breathing is hastening and the clutch has been more animated and more violent and the slight beads of sweat begin at the brow but soon glisten against each other's flesh and the memories of the dark night are now colliding with the orange-browns of a sun against a tent and the tent is still zippered and the air is bright humid but the eyes are still closed...the wishes are still being made, the blankets of warmth are replaced with the skin upon skin and we definitely do not need a blanket but we fall and we tumble and we are like stars burning and streaking upon a sky so that somebody, anybody may make a wish upon us but it is too late because we have already claimed every wish as our own....and we peek our eyes open and it is day and it is morning and we smile against the mouth of each other, we taste the sweet succulence of each other and it is because we know that everything that we wished for hours before has become suddenly and stunningly true.

Proximities

What do you see in me?

She had asked in the most quiet of moments, in an evening across the room.  It was darkening outside, cold, and there was really no other noises...maybe heat ticking, maybe fans whirring somewhere, maybe a plane flying 40,000 feet above them and maybe car lights glazing yellows across roads but her question was the only sound he heard.

He looked up at her.

Really?

A stare, across the distance, like a buoy in a storm.  It could move up and down in the tempest but it would hold steady with its light.  Right now, the question caused the room to move but her eyes were the light that centered on him.

How much time have I got?

From the brief distance he saw a wan smile, but her eyes revealed a darker curiosity, a potential vulnerability.

Well...he started...are you familiar with the law of unintended consequences?

Uhm, why don't you give me the Reader's Digest version.

Okay.  Well there are three versions of the law, but the one I favor is the first one, meaning a positive, unexpected benefit.  A windfall.  Serendipity.

Windfall?

An avalanche of goodness. 

I don't really get it.

Okay, let me put it another way.  How about the little things I learn are endearing, they are special, enigmatic.  You don't add up.  You're like a math problem that each time gives a different answer despite the same variables.

I'm a math problem?

Well, sometimes.  Other times you're geometry.  Or maybe even a new language.  My point is you are greater than you first appear...greater than you first arrive.  You know, you continuously get better...each moment...even when not doing anything other than sitting there.

That's what you see in me?

No.  That's what I look forward to seeing.  You reveal in snippets, rivulets.  You are like rain on a window, taking different paths, but always following certain rules.  

Rules?

Yeah, like gravity.  You have to, sort of.  But each time...it's different.

Different.

Yes.  Which is why I could never paint you.

Well you can't paint. 

Well that's true, but doesn't mean I couldn't try.  But if I did it would be a poor rendering.  It would be static.  And you change too much.

I do?

For me, yes.  Daily.  Maybe hourly.  Which is why when I see you, each time, it's still very different, very unique.  Like seeing a rough sketch or a draft work for the very first time, but still somewhat familiar.

Okay.  She was nodding like she understood, but probably didn't.

You know how people take pictures of sunsets, paint pictures of forests?

Yeah.

Those things happen daily.  Each day, around 5 or 6 the sun sets.  But the image is different...there are clouds, there are low pressures, there are elements of light and winds...no sunset is the exact same yet they are consistently beautiful.  Even if they are just marking the end of a day in a quiet, colorless effort.  That...he realized he had found the metaphor...that is what I see in you.  I wait for you to reveal to me how you will be and each time it is different...yet the same.

That's what you see in me.

No.  That is what you project.  I see much more, but that's what I will allow myself to share.

She was quiet, and he loved that. 

Inconspicuous

He punched in her numbers, knowing it was late, and a conversation fairly unlikely.  But the beauty of the process of dialing, of manipulating, of expending effort sometimes means that the connection is made.

Not always, but sometimes.

She answered with a voice full of sleep, cottony, and while he knew there were time zones he also knew that she had had a choice in answering and she had still chosen to answer.

What time is it?

I'm sorry...it's later where you are...I know you were asleep.

I had just fallen.  It's okay.

He wondered if she was up on one elbow, trying to see the time.  Or maybe she was flat in bed, eyes closed.

I just wanted to call you and tell you that I continue to find pieces of you...in the most inconspicuous of ways...

What?  She sounded a bit like she was still awakening...it was always a sound he wished he could discover in person, next to hear, clawing out of dreams and REM and the grasp of a night asleep...he always wondered if he could be there so that when her mind grasped the nuance of a morning that the normal pieces of the room were blocked by an outline of him.

I get pieces of you in the most innocent ways...reminders...or even actual parts...you know, like Harry Potter finding horcruxes--

What?  Are you quoting Harry Potter at...he heard rustling, knowing she wasn't on one elbow but was more likely on her back and now had to move and now she was annoyed.  at 1:30 in the morning?

Sometimes silence is a vacuum, sucking out the awkward.  He let her stay silent, wondering if she had returned to the flat of her back or was perhaps even now sitting up.

Listen. 

I'm listening.

So it's like a distance.  It's like if I put miles between you and I it is easy...it is erasure.  It is comfort, like somebody died----

Like somebody died?

Not like somebody close...like an ancestor, like somebody I had read about...like a history.  Like you're becoming a part of my history.

At 1:30 in the morning it feels like silence possesses weight...it's the tired, it's the exertion of an effort just to do the most menial...the most inconspicuous... 

Anyways, I found a hotel sewing kit...you know, just a plastic bag of a needle and thread, buttons and a safety pin.  It was like it could cause an easy repair.

Yeah? So?

He waited a few seconds.  You're not easily repairable.

She spoke after that...how is it like somebody dying then?

Well...it's not actually.  It's more like trying to save something that maybe has no chance...and perhaps the further away I get from it the chances diminish even further....but sometimes, occasionally, randomly and maybe even unwittingly I see something that reminds me that perhaps the wound is not fatal.  But perhaps repairable.

Repairable.  So...like a car?

He breathed out a laugh.  No...not a car...at least not on the outside.  Maybe on the inside.

The inside?

You know...the engine, the sparks, the fuel, the pulse...the parts of the car that make it alive.  I guess I could see a simile. But I guess a car isn't alive...this is something much more than metal.

In the early morning hours the brain has fallen mostly to critical bloodpaths...breathing, heartbeat, storage of energy for the next day.  It is not an ideal environment for debates, metaphors, similes...it needs the most innocent of tasks, perhaps the most inconspicuous.

So when does this happen? She asked.

Not always...just sometimes.

So you called to tell me you found a sewing kit?

No...I called to tell you that when I see a sewing kit, a tiny clutch of needle and thread I think of a wound that needs tending....or when I walk through the airport and see a mobile defibrillator I think of the shock of you to my system...or when I see a streetlight come on I imagine it's dark where you are but a thought of you casts light to me...or when I see a candle I think of you blowing it out and somewhere some part of me is extinguished....that's what I was calling you about.

Silence is awkward....not always, but sometimes...in the most inconspicuous of moments.

An Assumption

I want peace.

I want you across the room, shirking your responsibilities, shirking off your shirt.  I want the last bit of purple in the sky to fall into place, when your countenance is going from well-lit to shadow.  I want the sound of traffic to die down, and let an evening fold up its skirt, tuck in its ribbons, unlace long boots so that the laces wrap around tired fingers.

I want solace.

I want a solstice.  An in-between, an example of perfectly cut shapes, an afternoon of hours of you reading aloud.  I want poetry and cantatas.  I want jazz playing loud enough in the next room that I can barely hear it but I can just barely hear it enough to love it.

I want pieces.

I want to go to the salon after they have cut pieces of your hair, and I want to take the cut-off tendrils and put them in an envelope, spritz it with your lotions or perfumes and seal it.  So I can take it and open it up anytime I want to and have a part of you. 

I want doubt.

I want to hear you lecture the mirror.  I want to make you feel that the prism I view you in is the one perfect one.  Never dissected, never diluted.  I want to make you feel the way you feel when you move into the sunspot that is showing through the window and is only small enough for one person…warming, golden, falling so lightly across your skin and you barely notice.  It is like a fingerprint I have left upon you, only seen if powdered and dusted and then compared to all the fingers that have ever touched you and never finding a match.  Because of the uniqueness I make you feel.  Unmatched.  Because that is the way I find you.

I want chaos.

I want a mind at sea. I want a mind adrift, unmoored.  Untied.  Let go.  Unhinged.  Plain and simple symmetry.  Like a glimpse or a glance, a flipped-coin chance.  I want randomness, I want a lottery.  I want to crumple up the day’s notes, the library of hours and time and I want to light a bright red match to it and let it burn in my hands.  I want the sting of you.  A rubber-band snap. 

I want a respite.

I want you to merely know that you bloom in me, you bloom in my mind.  A hot-house flower that is ripe and alive, your surge in your colors, you wake and you move and in your disturbance of air, your mere walk across concrete and gray shapes you color the world in a color unknown…you push open the Do Not Enter door of my mind and dance…you carve your initials in dark hallways, you light candles that seemed so dead and you create such flint-like sparks in your stare.  You waltz through my mind in an unheard sound of music that fills my mind with lead and weighs me down with the luxury of knowing you…and being near you.  At times.

Candy from Summer

Do you remember, it must have been in the summer when the heat layered itself across us and we were intertwined like twizzlers, our shapes melding and aligning and soothingly sweet, our shoulders touching, our legs pretzeled together, our heads on the same pillow and our eyes so comfortably close…our faces flushed with pinks and the sweat still sweet in our hair.  Our mouths slightly parted, the breaths still coming quickly, a little hitch with a slight swallow, our heartbeat visible against the skin.  We lay against the sheets, the light of the afternoon kaleidoscoping in through the trees and the limbs and leaves, the sun dead even with the windows, and it was quiet…quiet like an abandoned church in the middle of the night…save for the slightly slowing breaths…and our mouths that had been so carnivorous,

so colliding, 

so active and alive 

were now so quiet…but still tingling, like we had been elbowed in the lips.  A gentle elbow though.  

But mostly, what I remember when I find myself in slow moments when I am in a phone-booth in my mind

is the slow, 

peeling 

of our skin as you gently removed yourself from me for a moment,

like a fruit-roll up being pulled away from its wrapping,

leaving the glorious candy to be separated and

slowly folded into my mouth.

The Neptune of You

Triton is the largest of Neptune’s 13 moons. It is unusual because it is the only large moon in our solar system that orbits in the opposite direction of its planet's rotation -- a retrograde orbit. Like our own moon, Triton is locked in synchronous rotation with Neptune -- one side faces the planet at all times.

It was a snow globe of an evening, the white dancing bits alighting in the wind, caught in the dull yellow of the porch lights, irregular shapes against the blackened tree line and twisting their way down to softly settle like children cuddled to sleep.

It was cold, a very cold that was like an absence.  Like a day of sun had been kidnapped and buried in a hole, leaving no trace of any previous indication of warmth. 

He had his boots on, although pebble-like bits of snow had found their way over the tops, warming against him and dampening his feet in icy slices.  He had trudged to the truck, clumsily using his arm to remove the snow from the hood and the top of the cab, again snow sliding sneakily into his cuffs, now bringing cold to his wrists and his forearms.  Not quite as annoying as his rapidly freezing feet but a damn sight not too far off.

He had turned on the engine, made sure the tailpipe was clear, and he could see red check engine lights on his dashboard.  The truck was dying, slowly, but was at least warning him.  He was either too poor or too lazy to get some things fixed.  It was how he was.  The truck didn’t matter much to him, it held way too many attic-scented memories of slammed doors or tears seen shimmering in the dim cast shine of a half-broken dome light.   The truck was their child from a broken home…he had just happened to keep it.  And it was dying on him.

From his driveway he saw no other cars, no other headlights.  It looked like the street had been attempted to be plowed.  It looked a little flatter, maybe not as deep.  He couldn’t really tell though.

He got in, pulling the driver’s door shut and it cascaded a dusting of snow into the interior.  He could still see his breath, against the red warning lights on the dashboard, and when he turned on the headlights the snow globe exploded as thousands of bits reflected back at him.

This is stupid, he thought.

Instinctively he glanced in the rearview mirror as he pulled the gear shift into reverse, watching the red taillights reflected against the falling snow.  There was nobody behind him and he edged back, threw the shift into drive and pulled slowly out.  He kept the accelerator on a slow steady pulse, could feel the balding tires grabbing as best they could and he seemingly crawled onto the main highway.

It had been plowed, awhile ago, but he could make out the lumps on either side of the highway so he could stay on the pavement.  

The headlights carved a keystone white against the gray road, and the flakes pilloried his truck like they were trying to get inside.  

The heater was starting to work, and he wasn’t as cold in his wrists and feet.  He had worked to get the radio on, and he found a jazz station that faded in and out.  It was not appropriate music but once he found it he left it alone.  Again, it was how he was.

Ahead a lone snow plow was coming in his direction, yellow warning lights on top of the cab, its bulk visible as it straddled the highway.  A slew of road snow was being thrown to the side and he tapped his brake a little bit to make sure he passed slowly as the plow converged on him.  The back end of the truck was a little loose and he felt a slight slide to the right but he quickly steered in that direction and he got straight again as the plow went by.

The road returned to being dark again in front of him.  

The trip wasn’t very far, really a few miles yet in the dark and in the snow and the cold it made for a much longer ordeal.

In a way it was like the orbit of a cold moon of a distant planet.  He traveled the seemingly infinite distance in a gravitational pull.  Sometimes nearer, sometimes farther, but never touching.  Never colliding.  Although his moon was pockmarked with numerous collisions, numerous impacts, touches, glances, blows.    

He pulled onto the street where he knew that she lived.  The snow had taken a break.  So had the snow plows apparently because the street was barely discernible…the ground flat from the front of the houses in a smooth plane to the other side of the street.  He slowed, the wheels crunching, turning slightly against the soft white, his high beams revealing a flat planet of snow.  

He stopped the truck a house or two shy of hers…the engine idling, the sky opening up again with the flakes and as he glanced towards her place he saw a light turn on upstairs.  He smiled a tired smile, a relieved smile as he realized she was inside, she was warm and she was safe. 

 He didn’t continue to drive until he was in front of her house.  Rather, he carefully backed up, found the driveway of another house and reversed his trek through his own tire prints.  

The return trip seemed shorter.  Like a retrograde orbit.