Tonight though

Tonight's moon was sort of like a half button of an elevator...not quite full, barely yellow.  Did you see it?

Tonight was a bit of the past...an outside air hazy with humidity, stickiness...(do you remember the way your hair would curl, do you remember the sweat on a lip?)  It is ironic that the heat and the warmth of day finds me cold in a swift thought of you...that you were a bit of the ice down the back of my shirt feeling...stark.  Contrast.  Unexpected.

I think the thing of you that I reminisce about is just how your invasion of my mind was to immerse me into you...like stepping out of the air-conditioned car into a world-ful of heat.  Off the sidewalk, off the street.  Heat posturing, heat enveloping.  You.  Once,  you were that heat, the minute I could walk into a presence of you.  Nearby.  Next to.  Closer at times.

Now, it's far.  It's a distance.  An orb away like the moon, a touch away like the button of an elevator.  Both take me places...some just sooner than others.

You glanced against me tonight...and changed the temperature.   Maybe just in my mind, or maybe just in the time of the day. 

But tonight though...I remembered a thing or two and in that same shallow instance I remembered a warmth that was long gone after the sun.  And that sometimes the heat of an evening isn't due to anything other than proximity.  And not some moon shaped object that is miles away.

Palpable

Say something pretty...say something pretty about me.

In a dark with grays and light colors, her voice was southern sounding.  Slow, honey over pebbles.
He turned slightly, the stir of sheets ruffling.  He could see her outline, the landscape of her in the darkish almost Kodachrome light...she was present. 

Of course she was. 

Where would I start? he responded, the morning quiet, the day early.  Rain.  Not yet though.

He saw her arms move to cross themselves across her.

Start where I'm not the prettiest.  

He laid back down so that he was flat, staring at the ceiling.  There's parts of you that perhaps I haven't seen.  But even then, maybe I guess I could start with the scars.

Okay.

Because they are the start of healing.  I love them, in that now you are past them.  Yet they are still there.  Alone, I guess I could see where they are a point of...well a point of you where you would cover.  

I do.  Well...I try.

And I love that...I love that I get to see them.  To me, at least...there a bit of a reminder that you can be cut, and maybe healed.  I find a lot of you more than that.

Silence.  A bit of a risk.

She started:  Okay, that's fair.  But let's get to something prettier.

No...let me linger here.  Because this is important...this is why you need to see me the way I see you.

How?

Because you need to see that the starting point of what I find attractive in you, at the very beginning of that attitude...starts with something that you don't like.  We are at opposite ends here.  I think the part of you that may be a little different is exactly why I think you are extraordinarily different.  And it just keeps cascading from there...your hair, your teeth, your eyes...all of those I can compare with everybody else.  But your scars...goddamn, that's you.  

The light outside was widening....the grays moving to a little more white.  The negatives of the photos becoming the Polaroids.

So I could say a bunch of things about the prettiness of you...but I guess the thing that I would leave you with, the thing that I would want you to remember....is this.  I find many things pretty...things at night like colors and skies, the way headlights look across a field when coming towards me...like rivulets of rain on a glass window high above a city.  I think pretty is a word that is only a bit of justice.  When I see you...I don't see a point in time.  I don't see a snapshot.  Yes...yes, of course you're very pretty.  But it's beyond that...it's what you make the day...it's what you make the moment.  You add....you enhance.  You're not just pretty.  But you make the minute with you in it that much more.  Even in the dark.

He heard her breathing...and even in that quiet rhythm he found a glow.

For Awhile

It is like the air tastes different...not necessarily in a bad way, but in a way that implies an absence.  A piece not included...a hole. 

For awhile it was simple, as achingly easy as a morning wobbling like a toddler to get up, light a yellow sun and drag it across the sky until smashing it on the other side into bits of orange and pink.

It is not emptiness, because the day looks exactly the same as before.

It is not abandon...it is nothing like that.

The rope tire swing simply frays, once-strong chords straining, yielding, undoing...that place in a summer when there wasn't anything else...anybody else...except the both of them.

The rope... one day...
one strand, slowly unveiling and unwinding...not even a snap when it lets go but rather a simple string that breaks soundlessly...a tire slowly rolling away from a tree.  It's not absent.  The piece parts are there...the rope now hanging, still tied to the tree...the tire feet away. 
But damn is it broken.

For awhile though it wasn't.  For awhile it was timeless, effortless.  For awhile it felt just like breathing.

Now nobody has fixed the rope swing and nobody has moved the tire.  Summer is now a hot pale haze and spiders lay eggs in the darkened places of the tree. 

But it is a lovely view that remains, when there wasn't absence but presence.  When the day was occupied by a laugh, a brief word...a glimpse.  And held me there, not caring about the other hours, the other minutes. 

For awhile.

But not now, where my heart lies scattered beneath that rope swing like a sun-scorched tire, blackened by time.