safe

Safe.

Near, the distance of a kiss.
Collarbones touching, a rising from a breath.  I can feel your smile.

A cottony silence...not absolute...a rustle of a sheet, a slight clearing of the throat.  A blink, the eyes adjusting to growing light.

Warmth...the warmth that gathers in the night against a sleep, and puddles in pockets and spills out as we adjust ourselves against each other in a morning.

Safe, locked doors and drawn curtains...time becomes just a color of the morning...varying, moving but not hurried.

Hair askew, no mirrors yet, but comfort in the complete stare and kindness felt in the touch...kindness...appreciation.  No demands, just surrender...acceptance.

Nothingness.  Everything.  All at the same time.

The segue from sleep to this relaxed awakening...childlike, comforted.

The willingness to say anything...say everything.  Because I know I am safe.

Long Airport Walkways

There is such a willingness to subscribe to enduring the distance when the destination is ultimately you.

I wander as you sleep...your horizontal body aligned to the horizontal walkways I trudge upon, my steps coming nowhere close to where you are...rather I will need a man-made machine to fly me closer.

So my walk has no purpose, except to remind me that I am awake and you are likely not.

Are you dreaming?  Are you discovering in your sleep?  Are you remembering?

Somewhere out from this speck of airport there is snow...not here.  But out there, falling in a reminder of cold climates and mid-Fall storms.

Not here...the night is tepid, the warmth of bath water.

Out there is rain, but not here.  No delays or impact to this perfectly hewn night.  It is a perfect night to travel.

But in beds where there is snow lovers cling and clutch to each other, beneath blankets and wools, warming each other with their embrace.  In beds where there is rain lovers listen to the whir of the sounds on the roof...the white noise relaxing them, drawing them closer.  Maybe a fire is still spitting and blinking orange and black embers as it dies in a library fire-place.

Not here...the perfect weather lies out there in the blackness...I'm vertical and you are not here at all.

DNA

The plane arrived late, in a rain and he was almost in the last row nearest the bathroom and surrounded by kids and first time travelers.  He put his earbuds in and found a favorite song and closed his eyes against the seat, knowing it would be minutes before he was moving again.

Planes.

Planes and hotel rooms were his world.  Cities and time zones.  Passing through.  His mind was time-stamped and riddled with the scent of airports.

But for one brief moment he had been with her.  Held her.  For a moment his world was the size of a king-sized bed and his universe was the color of sheets and her eyes.  She had drifted into his, aligned and shared.  

She brought a summer day into the week when it was fall.  

For one night it was hearing the night noise of crickets and peep frogs...the sound of a ferry churning against the waters on the James River, the noise of moths whirring against a screen door under a light.

She brought a warmth to a day that was spitting cold rain and red taillights in traffic.

He remembered a time when she had asked to wear his tee shirt.  He was standing there in the morning, hair tussled from sleep.  It was a benign request but she was topless and the morning outside was just a gray and people were still starting their commutes and boiling coffee and she was naked and near.

He pulled it over his head and she swam her arms through the holes and allowed it to fall on her...it wasn't tight on her but her nipples poked through and he wished he had given it to her earlier.

It smells like you, she said and lay back down on the pillows.  Outside it was yellowing and a sun was competing with clouds and the rain had stopped and the puddles were shimmering in the moist light and it was still quiet in the room but his eyes were fixated on her.  And she was staring back.

The plane was still crowded as people tried their best to unlodge their suitcases packed in the overhead bin.  His song was replaced with another, and he forwarded it to find one he liked.

He remembered when he was packing up his items, and his shower kit was being put into its bag with the razor and the cologne.  He glanced into the sink and saw a hair of hers had fallen, perhaps in her departure, as she re-assembled and re-acquainted herself with her morning it had tumbled off of her as she brushed it and primped in the mirror.  It was a stark reminder that she had been there.  

It wasn't just something his mind had conjured up.  He held the hair in his hand before letting it fall back into the sink, swallowed by the water and into the drain.  

It departed down the small hole in the sink. 

 He walked out of the small hole in the plane, emerging and remembering like it was just yesterday that he was with her.

Ante Meridiem

There are beautiful spaces to watch the sun emerge...high on cliffs in crystal cool mornings unfiltered with any fog or obstruction.

An ocean, a perfect line on the horizon.

On an airplane, where the entire sky is available, and explodes through the tiny windows and illuminates the interior like spotlights.

In a city, where the buildings shred the light into prisms, narrowed into colored slots on the street.

I prefer just the gradual lightening of the room, as the sheets start to whiten in the paleness waning through the curtains, the way your features start to become more defined and I can finally see the colors of your eyes.

Phantom Limb

She glanced quickly over her right shoulder as she departed, the words pale in the morning air beside the door.

It was a pull.  An extraction.  Disconnecting from something alive and humming with energy.

Her departure pulled skin, tore muscle, left him in the void.  A blown out candle.

It didn't matter that the rest of the day was amongst strangers, in the mist of a blown out hurricane crossing the country.  The sun was just a white spot, a light behind the sheets, no warmth or cream-colored afternoon for him.

Rather, low clouds narrowing the views, diminishing the heights and pushing him further downwards.

Like pulling an arm out of its socket, like the sound a light bulb makes when it burns out.  Perhaps unscrewed slowly out of a lamp.  Either way, she was in him and then she was gone.

But he could still feel her there.  And it hurt and he kept trying to soothe it and it was invisible.

Pearls

Friction.

In my jet-lagged mind even the tiniest of thoughts is enough to be an irritant.  Enough to distract and bounce like a loose ping-pong ball against bad angles.  I'd rather just shut down bits and pieces until I have nothing but a sand laden pattern that requires no colors or inquisitions...just nothing.

In my horizon there are colors and lights that need no attention...just a simple nod towards something that my brain can register.  Okay, I see you.  I recognize the sight or sound.  I process.

But instead I'd prefer your invasion...a thought of you like a tiny sand in the oyster.  I want you to rub against me, rub against a frayed brain that is trying to shut down. I want you to be the light left on downstairs...forcing me to turn and go back and acknowledge.

I want you to be the cramp in the foot, the itch on my side...I want you to remind me not to go to sleep but rather stay and play...I want you to be the sand in the sheets from a stay on the beach.  I want reminders.

I want to feel the grate of you against me, even if you are merely a thought of you.  A tiny, small piece of an idea.  A description.  A memory.  A reminder.

Sand in the sock.  Sand in the shoe.  A grain of sand against an entire black slate floor.  Doesn't matter.

Just unique.  Just you.  Fighting against me.  I feel you in my sleep, I feel you in my walk.

And your constant rub, your constant against me creates a sensation.  A constant sense of whatever you bring makes us beautiful.  Maybe only I can see as it resides inside of me...but I can see it.  I can sense it.

You...your friction, creating the perfect pearl of what I hope to find and what you add to me with the simple and constant allowance of us being together.