Editor's Note

Dear reader, I did not suddenly  sit down and pound out a bunch of new pieces.

Rather, I just tied off some drafts that I felt I could release...I quite often try to force myself to contribute something frequently...but in the middle of it I sometimes lose my mojo.   It's not an excuse...I just feel it's not quite ready.

Most of the time I do it all in one sitting, and just let the flow take the words and craft whatever I'm thinking...to me it is like jazz....freedom and one-time notes that cannot be captured or put back for editing.

It's probably the single biggest reason why I will never make it as a writer...I hate to change the things that I initially create and do not want them to be altered.

Align

She was laying alongside him, her head just along his breastbone, and her hair was spilling upon him.  He was holding bits and pieces of it in his hands, splayed between his fingers, moving from the top of her head down to her shoulders.  He could see the white scalp, the shades of hair color starting and then moving in colors away from the part-line.

Every now and then he would open his palm and slide it down the length of her hair, like he was smoothing out the ends. Sometimes he just rested his hand slightly behind her ear, and let his fingers trace the hairline from their until it disappeared into the tapering behind her neck.

His chest moved slightly, because she was extremely light against him, and she molded onto him like she was pressed from an iron, warming, clinging, but slowly and gradually.  Melting.  Butter into the crevices of hot corn on the cob.  Rivulets of waffle-mix spilling and bubbling into the streets of the griddle.  When she was against him, in these quiet and effortless moments, he often felt like they shared each other...like a part of him was strung into her, and he needed to feel her breathe for him to breathe...that he needed to watch her pulse beat sweetly in her neck for him to metronome his own heart.

She breathed in, he breathed out.

What are you doing up there?  She murmured against the tee shirt of his chest, and she said it like she had suddenly awakened.  He had never been the first voice she had spoken to in a morning, but he had always known how it might sound.  Or at least he had hoped.

I'm admiring your scalp.

She tilted her head upwards, and he saw down her forehead, the angle of her nose, the rise of the cheekbones seen from above.


I'm pretty sure it's like all the others you've seen.

You'd be wrong.

Why?  Have I got something in my hair?

No...no.  You've got beautiful hair.  Nothing to worry about.  All good from up here.

She moved her head so it went back down, he couldn't tell if she was looking at something or had her eyes closed.


I was just finding a part of you that I had never really noticed he offered up.

You're taller than me...you get lots of time to study my hairline.

One would think...but it's where the scent of shampoo lingers the most, where the conditioners moisten and...condition, I suppose.

They're doing their job...this feels like an inspection.

He stopped.  Hardly.  I'd call it admiring.  I always love the different parts of you that make up the whole...but I will stop for now.

Thank you.

He didn't tell her that he did it to remind him that she was real, that she was there...that she had skin that could be cut, that she could bleed, that she wasn't just this part of his imagination but rather delicate and glaringly real.

A Storm to Wake to

It was well after midnight, well past the point that they had ascended upstairs, and intertwined themselves on the double bed.  They slept back to back, an indicator of the mood, as some reluctance had gently undone some things...he imagined ribbons of two different colors that had been tightly tied.  Now they were dangling, just barely touching each other.

Her house in Wakefield faced north, so that the slow arc of the sun traced itself from right to left across her yard.  The prevailing winds usually came in the opposite direction, westward...so it was usually a surprise to be immersed in a storm...you couldn't watch it come in like a distant ship that starts like that dot on the horizon.

So as he had listened to her breathing become a rhythm, his awareness of her nearby and being asleep, he was almost there when the slight rumble came from outside.  Hesitant to jostle the bed he slowly turned and soon he was flat on his back, watching the ceiling, waiting for the storm to arrive.

It wasn't too long.

He counted the beats between the flashes and the thunder and could tell it was moving quickly towards them.  She was still asleep as he glanced over and saw her shoulders rising slightly with her sleep breathing.  He wanted to say something, wanted to gently wake her...but in this peace before the evening exploded he stayed quiet...wanting her to keep these moments to her...not him.

The room suddenly lit up like a thousand floodlights flashed once and then immediately turned off, while in that blinding blink a bomb went off in the boom of a thunder cracking the evening in two.  He felt her body jump slightly and she let out a small almost child-like noise.  It had scared her.

He flipped to his right and put his arm around her.

She didn't resist.

For the next 20 minutes he held her, and when the blinking whites from the weather finally stopped she was back asleep against him.

Finally he reluctantly went to sleep...trying to dream exactly what he was doing with her right then and there.

Another Day...just like Any Other One

There were small signs, indicators...but he tried to turn them, reverse them.

She mentioned in comments, little lines about little lines...laugh lines, little parts of her she was worried about...a change that was enveloping her.

He reminded her to go out at night and watch a star...find a planet...look at a shiny, gorgeous sight and realize it was thousands of years old.

She always countered "if I was that far away I'd be beautiful too."

And he always said "the closer you are the finer you are."  And he meant it.

But it was hard to convince her.

But he also knew he would never stop trying.

Nuthin'

What are you thinking about?

....


...


Nothing.


That's not true at all of course...I'm watching the clouds pull from themselves like cotton candy tugged by invisible fingers as the storm breaks apart and small patches of blue emerge.

I'm listening to the helicopter slowly lower itself to the roof of the nearby hospital, then I'm wondering if the person inside is going to live.  I then wonder how many people are dying in the hospital even now, completely invisible to me...their lives just fading hundreds of feet away from me.

It is not depressing...it is life...it's not nothing.  It's not nothing at all.

I'm discovering new music, new genres...newer lighter combinations with no vocals, soothing and stimulating at the same time...perfect for studying...perfect for reading...perfect for crafting a bit of the pieces of papier mache that form a paragraph for you.  A form, a construct.

I'm dispensing time in an afternoon, drips like those spilled by a dropper...water dripping from the spigot in a tub.  Eaves still dripping from an afternoon storm.

The spread of you across my mind...layered, thinly but cleanly across the ridges in my mind.

Maybe at times spiking, maybe at other times ebbing.

But never...

Never....

Nothing.

Ten Summers

Ten summers ago...maybe nine.  She had shared a picture.

Cloudless skies and sweet breezes, harbinger of a gorgeous evening...but not yet...

The grass freshly mowed, perfect striped lines in parallel, the smell of wild onions and cuttings mingled, like bits of confetti that alighted in the air.

A company picnic, with white sticker name tags....it was weird seeing her full name, mostly because I referred to her first one so often...

She was laughing in the photo, that great wide smile...

And around her waist she held a hula hoop, still in her hands...she hadn't launched it around her yet.

Her shorts were dark, her shirt white...the colors standing out were the green of the grass and the hoop in her hands.

The camera captured her just before she started swinging her hips.

I had seen their rhythm before...had felt them against me...her wearing a bit of a different smile but one nonetheless.

She had shared a picture, from a summer a long bit ago.

But everything stayed exactly the same.

Location

Where are you?

Posed as a question but more likely a statement.

Can't do the math in my head...can't do the GPS thing, the latitude or longitude.

Rather the simple response is you're in my head, on that shelf you occupy.  That space....that location, the room with the key that you have to jiggle in a certain way to get the lock to open.  The familiar...the frame.  You need not move, you need not change.

Outside of that, there is a world in flux.  A world that is sometimes chaotic...changing...issues and drama. Dealing with the razor cuts of just a world that is so embarrassingly different that I cannot describe the issues...

of...

the...

Day.

And then I fumble around for the key.  To unlock the door that opens the room.  To a shelf where I have put you.

Trust me there is no dust on this door.  It is frequented often...maybe too much.  Maybe increasingly due to those outside bits of weather that force me indoors.

Like rain on a parade...not like rain on a wedding day.

I hear that's good luck.  And right now that's in short supply.

So, I return...I sometimes talk out loud to you, other times I'm quite sure I ask you to guess.

The thought...the clear comfort in knowing that you are resident within my mind is quite often enough...that there is a you...that truly exists and that is outside the lines.  That there is a you that happens to be as exquisite as the very first time....that there is even a possibility of you for the very next time...

that our binding cords are visible, tangible, tactile and touchable.  There is no guessing what happens when we are within arms-reach.  There is no mystery of how this ends.

Rather it is the math equation of when that happens again...when the lines intersect.  When the conjoined makes its way from the past into the present.

I never need to guess your location.  It is rightfully and always where I can find it.

It's just the detail of when you jump off the shelf in my mind and can become a slight weight in my arms that makes it difficult.

The Return

Coming back...

Returning...

Hard to do when it's back to more hills to climb, more days to face...particularly when the sand from the beach is still present in your shoes...the memory of the ocean vivid and the body clock broken from never having to worry about the time.

But it is also a bit of a return for me...a rejoining if you will.  Where perhaps we will keep common hours, common minutes...common shapes to our day.

For perhaps, in your return from a place on Earth that is soothing, easing, allowing the mind to let itself go unmoored for a bit...I can be a new sanctuary.

I can never replace the evenings...but maybe I can return your mind to a place in an evening, when you floated and gazed upwards...perhaps my voice can lift you to that horizontal position and if you close your eyes maybe you can see the tiny fires in the stars again.

Your return is just as much for me as you...I get to to have just the chance...the smallest minute chance that we can come together...

And it may not happen.

But in your return there is at least that chance.

Welcome...I raise a glass to you as you arrive to another evening in your return.

Dare County Regional Airport

Initially, he couldn't find anybody who knew how to get there...yes, by car for sure.  And another one mentioned something about a bus...God knowing how long that would take.

No.

He needed to get there, faster than most humanly possible.  No commercial airlines were able to get any closer than Norfolk but that still required another couple of hours by car.  The thought of sitting in tunnel traffic made him feel almost nauseated.  He couldn't imagine sitting idly in a car trying to get to someplace fast.

So he called a friend he knew in college...a friend who constantly posted on Facebook pictures of his progress in becoming an amateur pilot...hell he was even building his own plane.  The only awkward part was it had been 30 years since he had last spoken to him...but they picked right up where they had left off...well not exactly but close.  You see the last time he had really been with his pilot friend was at William & Mary, as juniors on a weekend trip and he had to sit calmly and quietly in a girl's sorority lobby while the pilot friend loudly hooked up with said girl in the bathroom.  Nearby.  It was an awkward yet bonding experience for sure.

So the pilot friend laughed at the memory and while not completely understanding the motivation, he agreed to fly him down to get as close as possible as speedily as possible.




Flying in a small propeller plane is nothing like commercial airlines....the winds are more impactful and flying at a lower altitude makes the scenery more compelling...he flew down the coastline so to his left was the initially light blue darkening to an almost purple as the Atlantic spread out away from him.  The surf in its white streaks scribbled up and down the beaches and people dotted the landscape with colorful umbrellas and blankets.

As he felt the plane move inland and start to lower he knew he was starting to land.  It was very noisy in the plane and he had taken off his headphones so he wouldn't hear the mindless chatter of the pilot and air traffic controllers.  It was a white noise though...soothing.

Like catching her in a lazily sleeping braless moment.

He watched the treelines starting to get larger, knowing as his ears popped that they were descending.  The ocean was now at their backs and the inlet waters, green and sparkling with dots of sunlight were now beneath them.

From the air, Dare County Regional Airport looks like two white lanes against the terrain, just a small terminal and it nestles on an island near the barrier outer banks.

Somewhere, on that ocean, she was nearby.  Somewhere, right on the waterline.  She might even notice a small plane, or hear the drone of its engine.  Never would she guess he was coming to see her.

He watched as the plane oriented itself along the axis of the runway, watched the ground start its ascent towards them and the slight bump when the wheels touched down.

The plane taxied a short ways, pulling up near the terminal and he shook his friend's hand and gave him double the cash he originally quoted.  His friend protested but he shook it off and made him take it.

He opened the door, the sun exploding on him and the breeze carrying the scent of the ocean and wax myrtles, and he remembered those trees blooming in Spring and being "daintily aromatic".
The sky was a blue that you only saw near the ocean and he felt like he was a bit in an undertow...her presence nearby, her gravity pulling him towards her.

He remembered a Roxy Music song and hummed it as he waited for his cab.

In the Middle of a Night

It's like waking up in a strange bed, in a strange house...disoriented from the darkness in the middle of a night...unfamiliar surroundings, different furniture...perhaps not too far removed from just one drink not needed.

Perhaps it is the comfort of a cold glass of water at the bedside to restore familiarity...to re-orient and remind that this is a vacation house...away from the normals. Away from many, many things.

At once restorative and contemplative...hours to while away, no deep thinking necessary.  Just a blank-slate mind erased for a little while, to undo knots in a mind, let things tethered go untethered.  Release a black balloon of worry and let it disappear.

With the return of a normal heartbeat, with the slowing down of normal breathing, the body slips back into a comfort that it can collect and gather and cocoon you into...while the mind lets itself go unmoored and starts to wander on the dark sea that makes up the time after midnight.

The world starts to dissipate, the sun remains in some other world, the hint of the next day is but a ghost...there is nothing to keep the eyes from closing and remaining so for as many hours as one can go.

And then, like flicker from a lighthouse, across that black sea after midnight...a small and tiny but brilliant thought of you inserts itself into my mind...and triggers, like a hunger, an unsatisfied emotion that reluctantly starts to blaze inside me...this little craving that will once again plague me as I struggle to re-find sleep in the middle of a night.

Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy

Awake with me...rustle the sheets and with your bed-head hair and sleep-warm skin pull me into an embrace...a quick whisper in my ear about something that sounds like coffee and then you disappear downstairs.

Arise with me...resting the cups of steaming java on the fence posts, the air crisp...fresh-scrubbed and filled with just a hint of sea-breeze...the waves small and glassy, just lazily licking at the slope of the beach.  Your kiss tastes of last night's dreams, last night's salt, last night's taste of you...and a little bit of coffee.

Adjoin with me...grab towels and sunscreen, a large cooler of ice and Summer Shandy, vodka and cranberry in case we over-stay our welcome at the water and get too lazy to come up...find a quietness that is just ours, a quaintness that reminds us of when we were very small and ventured to the beach...wide-eyed and innocent.  Let us remind ourselves how small we are...let me remind you how you loom in my mind, you bloom in my brain...you remind me of the things that I find hard to put into words, hard to define...and the closest things are similar to describing the ever-changing blues of the waters before us.

Adjourn with me...let the day define us by the pink of our skin as we get nuzzled by the sun...oblivious in the warm winds...the empties of the bottles tinkling in the cooler, the ice just cold clear water...the salt in our hair, wind-blown and full...the ocean still heaving against the sand, the sun behind us and in its last quarter...we won't need the sunset as I'd rather take in the pinks of you.  I'd gather the belongings, hold as much as I could in the left hand...with my right I'd reach down and pull you up...pull you towards me...watch you melt into me the way the sun is melting somewhere in the west.

Pie

The day is divided into day-parts...24 hours, a bunch of minutes too high to calculate on my fingers...I allocate portions...a piece of pie to each day.

Here for sleep, perhaps less than I would care for...

Here for when I get to drink...less than I would care for.

The day has its milestones like almost always...I wake, I drink coffee, I drive to work against a cement forest and traffic...I plug in and I communicate.  I spread my thin wafers of time against a day of demands and requests....

My work consumes me like the weather...I have to respond...I have to be in it...hurricane or gorgeous day.  It fills me with a paycheck that makes me get up the next day...and the next.

The evenings are very slight...tiny moments in the amount it takes for a sun to decline over a western line.  Then dinner...then a drink or more.

The day begins...I rise and I carve out the pieces and allocate them.  Distribute them for those that need a piece of me.


But there is another day...another set of sunrises and sunsets...a brief interlude or an invasive thought...another set of minutes and hours.  And like a broken clock the hands don't move forward but rather backward.

They spin off back into a time that is so much the opposite of my current day.

The bits of my day that are taken by you...devoted to you...allocated to you.  Surprisingly they appear in a song on a radio, a reflection in a mirror...a bed still warm beneath the covers...and the mind moves into a space that you only occupy.

In my mind there is a clock of you...that remembers and records...it tracks our time together and then spools backwards to remind me of it.

It is the direct opposite of the minutes that I awake to that remind me that we are spending another day apart.