Oxygen

What she didn't know was after a kiss, when they retreated briefly to find each other's eyes and find the iris and study the dark colors is he would breathe in very lightly, like hoping to pull even more of her into him, like her essence, like her air, like her exhalations that could be just one more thing, one more piece, one more part of her that he could consume.

And it could be only in those moments, in that proximity...that sacred air that he could pretend.

Phone lines and email...like bottled air...like those pneumatic tubes used in bank deposits...put your money and deposit slip in and it whooshed away from you to some mysterious vault and be returned with a receipt....just the to's and fro's of a day or a week of distance...

Like reverse CPR...somebody is not breathing into you but rather drawing your breath out and it is a cold and far away feeling. 

Drowning...being away from her was drowning...like watching someone just beneath the surface...that was him...he couldn't find the air...and maybe above him she was watching, unable to help.

That cold, cold distance was a pollutant...a fog.  An air uninhabitable for long...the death zone on Everest...being apart was that space...outer space...airless, without oxygen.

Breathing became a chore...work became a dungeon...a tightened collar. 

No wonder the heart and the lungs remain so close in proximity...they feed off each other, turn blood red from blue...become dependent.

She had smash-grabbed his heart long ago...pummeled the outside glass, reached in with robber's gloves and clenched it in a victory grasp.  So know he needed her to breathe as well...to sustain. 

And in absences he weakened...sickened....his fine heart beating bravely in her clutch...

And only in her return, her proximity, her mouth upon his would she provide the restorative breath that would re-awaken him...return him from his pieces...revive him and remind him of the very oxygen that she had become.

The End of Summer

Rain...that was the first sign.

He sat in the car outside of where she worked...it was a bit of an invasion to occupy this space...to intrude her here...but he felt it was worth it since she had preoccupied a space in his mind for the last year...a sacred and secret place where only she could dwell...

Summer had melted away from them...a humidity that stifled.  It made them sluggish and distant...the slow slog of a summer calendar dissolved between them and a day became a week and then months...and in-betweens were like heat-lightning...brief and chaotic....brilliant but then done.

And then the damn rain...and its memories that filled him like a downpour onto an old house with poor gutter structure...leaking and spilling over and cascading in a deluge that is over-whelming...their first meeting in a storm and the protective cocoon of each other...first touches and glances and new skin and flesh...tastes.

No amount of rain could diminish that first full taste of her.

Her mouth in a storm.

But now, here towards the end of summer...it had been some time.  Passages. 

And he could remember everything about her if he tried....

Enough to fill a decade of summers...

But for now he'd just take an hour of her time if she relented...if she allowed...

Just to stand near...

Just to be near...

like the rivulets of rain streaming across his car window...never sticking...just sliding down in their gravity-pull...the way she slid across his memory...pooling at the bottom...

Signaling the end of summer like a sudden wake up to a cold and frost-bitten morning in Fall...the sudden removal of warmth...the fading of suntans...

Her absence was winter.

Linens

She was so beautiful against the shape of the bed...

She was so beautiful with her colors against the lightness of the linens.

Quiet sweet warmth of her arms...the way her body looked beneath the landscape of the sheets.

Her head upon pillows...the square of the sheet framing her like an art...moving...contrast...the indention of her upon the forgiveness of the pillow mirroring exactly like how she dented my heart.

Her walk to the linens was cat-like...slow, deliberate...stalking. Her outline a familiar frame, she rose above and upon me like a moon-rise...a comfort, familiar beauty.

The destruction of a carefully appointed bed, linens tucked neatly and stretched firmly across the landscape of the mattress, neatly pressed and corners perfect...with one hand she pulled back the sheets and exposed the place for me to fall...

To tumble...

together...

Paint our colors across the white linens...

perhaps the slight spill of wine...a claret color...or a darker version due to bourbon...or tiny sand-like pellets of salt from tequila...

the linens were a beachfront...
a poolside...
a cabana...
a snowfall...

against a pale palette we painted our summer and our fall...our bodies as brush strokes...

And when she departed I was left with the linens...askew...disrupted...smelling of her and her presence...her lotions and scents...and I would fall back upon them and pull them into me like I was clutching her even when I wasn't.

Distance & Other Difficulties

I can hear you smile over the phone...I can detect in your sigh the type of day you are having.

But absence from you is a lunar landscape...barren and devoid of anything worth loitering over...worth hovering over...

A wasteland.

And I worry that the voices that were once strong and animated, filled with words and stories punctuated by laughs and pitch are now barely echoes...and even at times just silence...

until I hear something pronounced the way you might say a certain word...and for a moment I am captivated...a long lost signal.

It's like the way a concert hall feels when the last piano note lingers in the air just mere seconds before the applause...the sound is like oxygen, to breathe in...to fall and push hair aside...that last word you said before hanging up....

I look up at the moon at night and I wonder if it looks the same for you...or if it is hidden, obscured by clouds or trees...I look at it early in the morning, as it gets orange and I find it more beautiful than at night and it reminded me that you are like that to me...your beauty starts my day and I seek to find it on the horizon and if lucky enough to see just a glimpse the change in my day is meaningful...the mood is like a brightening horizon...

Moonless nights look back at me like I feel...just absence.

Gut punch.

Starved.

No air.

Like life on the moon.