Human

She was devastatingly human...in fact she was the only one in his universe.

Daily parades of others would go by, slip by, slide by...bevies of beauties and their struts and their mascara eyes...

But she was infinitely human...to him, a reminder.  The flesh and bone and the visceral piece of her that existed.  She was rare.  To the point of almost forgetting how she was, how she felt against him, a reminder torn from a part of his brain shuttering memories...she arrived stark and revealing.  Each occasion marked from the one prior...similar but better.  Familiar but intimately stranger.

Like the slight surprise you feel when giving blood...watching literally your very life spill out into a cylinder tube.  Mesmerizing that something could be taken from you, put into a vessel...and maybe even given to someone else.

She was that life-blood...when she appeared she had been plucked from her life and inserted into his. Even if only temporarily.

He consumed her, felt her presence...but then she would disappear.  Not by any other circumstance but the one they possessed.

She had sent a picture...of her in a tub...a revealing picture of a window...a candle... a moon...and her knee.  Barely any skin against a backdrop of marble and the outside world.  But his eye was drawn not to the flickering wick against a red wax or the smudged-circle of the white of a blurry moon.

Rather he saw her knee, it's skin slick from warmed tub waters, rising against the surface of the wet...like some small volcanic island against a blurry foam ocean...the color of flesh, a human color, immediately recognizable.  He knew it was her, would know it in a thousand views from his memory, but this one felt more sensual.

Her solitude against the evening, her lone self in recline...showing just the piece of her that led to the rest of her.  He had held that knee before...in stockings coal-black and in just bare skin.  It was neutral ground...go lower and you find her smooth calves...go a little higher and you find the heat of her thighs.

The life-blood pulsated in his ears as he thought about finding her submerged in waters warm and cloudy, skin reflecting candle dance light and shades of whiteness from moons...just the ability to close the distance and graze her skin...her knee...and see her beneath the translucent waters to reveal the fullness of her...her unique and utterly human form...alone...for him to merely join and find the familiar and the intimacy of a stranger.

She was human.  Devastatingly so.

Therapy

There was a road alongside the farm that in the summer was a tawny dusty strip alongside the greens of the fields...but in the winter or when it rained it darkened until it almost matched the brown shades of her eyes...and he always tried to drive by it every time it rained.

He visited her once after his first deployment.  Before he headed back to his second tour.  The one where he got hurt.  Badly.

But this was the summer before, and he was with her, her brother's truck stopped alongside the fence of her father's farm.  She was sitting in the bed of the truck, the gate down, her bare feet hanging over the side.  He was standing, balancing a few rocks on the floor of the bed.

What are you doing?  Her voice was only slightly above the few cicadas that chirped in the trees...they hadn't been talking...rather it was like a transfusion...her mind caressing his...soothing his.  He just kept trying to hear her breathing, and time his to hers.  It was calming.

Balancing.  Trying to get these rocks to balance.

Why?

Because this is peaceful to me.

He could smell the shampoo from her hair...the ends still dark and wet.  He had interrupted her with his arrival and she quickly put on clothes to come see him, waiting on the porch.  She had keys in her hand and they gathered into her brother's Ford 150 and driven a bit down the driveway and turned out onto the adjoining road.  She had an FM station out of Virginia Beach playing songs he remembered but hadn't heard in awhile.

The rocks keep tumbling each time he got more than four and he looked around the road for flatter ones to balance easier.  He saw her regarding him, her head tilted in that familiar manner...like she was amused.

What?

Nothing. She smirked a tiny bit.

He found a couple of flatter rocks and he got up to six total, larger to small, the top one about the size of a marble.

Well there you go. 

He looked up again and she was smiling.  Yeah, he said, I was just hoping it would take me just a little longer.

Why?

Because I like this.  He lowered his gaze to the rocks.  I love this.

A few summers ago they had both used that word.  They had used it in the quiet and they had used it between a kiss.  But when he told her he was going to be deployed it snapped something between them...perhaps irrevocably.  

So now, in the sounds of an afternoon, balancing rocks in the bed of her brother's truck he still felt that word in his head.  He just didn't allow it to come out as much.

Me too.  She said softly.

Beside her in the sun he placed his hand slightly under her foot, holding it softly.  He had cleansed her before...soaping and softly washing her.  Again that was before.  Now she was clothed except for her feet.  So that's where she was naked and that is where he felt he could touch her.

I feel he started...that this is what you do for me...you bring me this balance...this shape.  You keep me still.  Just being beside you.  

He continued when I was far away...from here...from you...it was hard.  It was pretty much its own planet...its own place....fucking Mars...

...each day I knew you were somewhere...knew you were out there...but I was unbalanced.  I was adrift, despite having the platoon and the pilots and the noises that kept me moving and working...but so unbalanced.

He took off the top marble-sized stone...and then put it back.

Just even now, being near you...is some form of therapy...some bit of removal of things that were weighing me...he laughed quickly...sorry if I sound like I'm a bit of a flake and not some combat soldier.

The cicadas were white noise again...and another truck drove by, stirring up the silt and the dust-motes...they both turned away from it and soon the vehicle went past.

She was quiet.  Until...

This is therapy for me too.

He heard one of her favorite songs come on the radio and he went around and opened the door, turning the volume knob so she could hear it better.

His rocks remained balanced, throwing a tiny shadow against the bed of the truck as the sun tilted behind them.

He remained as well.