City

 It was raining in New York...the city.

It was like hot dog water...cloudy, mixed with scents and smells and while it washed away the streets it just made it a slippery mix of grime and parts of the city that would remain unwashed despite the deluge.

She was far.

Plucked felt like the most appropriate word...pulled from him.  It was always amazing how this city of over 8 million people and hundreds of skyscrapers could make him miss her even more...like the most benign of things...the way she formed words, the way she had the low laugh...visiting this city was the road-rash burn of the skin of his heart that had scabbed over...only to fall in exactly the same spot and bring blood again.

It was an itch...it was clawing from inside...to not be surrounded by strangers but rather the heat of her proximity.  Like the sand inside the clam that makes the pearl...let us be cloistered by the entirety of the ocean and spend time together...ages...and yield something beautiful...jewel-like.

Against this backdrop of a city...this spitting rain, making the streets blacker, the horizons grayer...the color of steel-wool...with just a simple drink in a quiet bar it felt like hell...a dismantled disorganized world that was filled with unfamiliar faces and nameless people.  All around him.

She felt fresh to him.  Not like a touch but an envelopment.  Swaddling.

That type of clutch that you look back upon...a long goodbye...just prior when you press your body...you pull one into you...fully clothed or whatever...that so-long at the airport...right before departures.  It is just a second longer than appropriate because it is meant to convey the inappropriate.

She was light upon him...not in a flashlight sense but in a dimmed one...turned low into an evening...when the room goes from yellows to mellow.  The way the room goes dark as one undresses...the lingering shadows more revealing than intended...the sweet simple fashion of two in bed going to sleep and a reach-over to the lamp to allow them to join in the dark.

She was a presence...a small weight beside.  A brush against in a hallway...hands grazed.  The weight of a stare.

She was time...passing it when near like micro-seconds only to feel whole decades when apart...not even seasonal like snow and fall...the time of a firefly in a summer evening.

She was far...and as spit rattled down upon the city he heard sirens and horns of a thousand others who couldn't even imagine the way the night might have been.

Descriptions

 

Describe me...it came out between the comfortable silence of two who could reside in silence comfortably...for long periods of time.  Minutes...maybe not hours...but with a storm approaching on a Sunday evening, wrecking the evening of humidity and high heat coupled with the already few amounts of drinks consumed it became a more complicated response.

Like your height? he said, knowing in the darkening light she held a firm tight lip, a disappointed shake of a head...her hair shimmering in the shake.  She didn't respond.

So he walked over towards the window where the last light of the afternoon was spilling in...already warmed up from the vodka...the mercurial elixir that freed his words from their bonds.

When I first began to know you...you were elusive.  Slippery...like a mermaid if that makes any fucking sense...I heard about you...knew about you, but every time I tried to see you...meaningfully see you, it was always a partial glimpse...and that just built the beauty.  Brick by little brick...I had this image of you...of what I thought you might be like...and with every almost-encounter it just kept getting larger.  I knew you existed but couldn't prove it.  Like some sort of mythical creature...snippets...that's what I got.

He watched the paparazzi sky light up with its flashbulbs...growing closer.

But then I got to know you...I got to see you...every day.  And I got to know you deeper...got to see your layers...your hardened outside shell.  

Like a turtle? she said, sounding annoyed...

No...no. More like a malt ball...this delicious outside layer...that was sweet and protective...

ok was all she said.

look...this is really hard he continued....it's like exploring you is like visiting some undiscovered land...it's a place of indescribable beauty...of new sights and smells...

Smells? again she asked...

Yes...do you know how fucking clean you always smell?  Like I can pass you by or pull you into me and you smell like a field of cotton...you smell like you have always been air-dried by a summer breeze...you don't smell like lotions or potions...you smell...human...you smell feminine...it is not flowery or sprayed upon...it is real...like skin that is capable of sweat and tears and tautness...you are an actual thing...an actual presence.

He moved a little closer to her...he was within a grasp...he merely just raised his glass towards her...she held hers up and gently clinked hers to his.  It was astonishingly loud despite the uproar going outside.

He continued...I love the word affection....it is an old word, probably just short of love...but that is what I love most about how you make me feel...it is, to go back to the landscape description...just when I think I have visited or seen all I've needed to see...you reveal just something more...like a new color...a new flavor.  Something I've never tried...yet it's the same person in front of me...always changing.  It is fresh...it is inviting...beckoning even.  I don't know.

The clouds were forming and gathering...coupling...pushing rain out of themselves and mixing and matching in a bit of thunder and lightning.

Every day...every evening...you take something so commonplace and just because you put it on, just because you mention it, just because it is associated with you it becomes infinitely unique.  It turns into something that cannot be replaced or duplicated.  I don't know.

Rain was almost there...starting to spit a little, the wind smelling full of it...almost breezing...not yet gusting...

every storm almost sounds the same, but each one is different...in tempo, in noise...in the lightning...the spread of thunder.  It's like a little bit of you but more so in how to describe you...indescribable...like comparing you to a thunderstorm...everybody has their own definition but when they see it up close it is more impactful than they remember.

So I'm loud? she offered, but he could hear a lightness in her talk.

Well...you can be...when I'm bringing storms to you.

Fair, she said...he heard her put her drink down as thunder crackled around them. 

Please go get me another drink and tell me more...she said it as the rain began to fall...around them...a unique storm but like all the hundreds of millions that happened it was time for it to surround them.  

He went in and started to look for ice.  He wasn't sure if she was happy or not but he hoped so.

Resting Here with Me

 Slow down your day...slow down your breathing.

Please...do not hurry away.  Please do not leave.

Please stay.

The opening of a morning with a creamy yellow sky and a rise of warmth against a window pane.

Awake in a morning with white pillows and covers, coverlets...alone in the ecstasy of memories of you in between...these sheets, these skin upon skin moments...please do not extract...please do not withdrawal.

Let my fingers graze yours.

Let my gaze linger.

Let the world become smaller, a room, a bed...a universe of entanglement that is deliciously small. The length of you astride a length of me.

There is a world outside that waits to pounce...it brings worries...stress, bills to pay, a few things to pick up at the market.

A key into an ignition to carry you away.

A gentle pull upon your wrist to pin you gently to the surface tension of a bed...a sheet.

I count the countdown of your mind to the minutes that you are counting down.

The streets fill with cars and noise, the crumple of traffic that allows strangers to wallow in silence and head towards drudgery...to wallow in sameness...the same damn thing every day...every hour.  To hit repeat again and again.

The sun will arc and create shadows...the light in the room will glaze over and become discreet...our presence in a shadow feels familiar...we recognize our outlines...our shapes.

Order us some drinks.

Let us partake.

Whatever it takes to alleviate the slight stress of the day...let it spill out amongst us.

The sun slices between limbs and leaves...it spills and scatters...it signals an end.  A day gone.  Mostly.

But damn the peace in our bodies...like matchsticks they connect and conjure.  Ignite.

The day blurs into a gray and eventually a black and all we do is find the sun in each of each other and yearn for the return of something warm and something we can wrap ourselves into...and it is warm.

It is warm.  We. 

Suture

 The evening is cleaved open, cut right in half with a horizon bleeding out colors as the heartbeat sun tumbles unseen and away, pulling the last strands of daylight into the blackening line that is merely called the West...it is a pencil drawn line from left to right and nothing much happens after the last shred of color finally caves in.

He was decidedly unhappy, watching the light reverse the dawn and fall across the low country of Virginia.  Nothing made him particularly happy...not even the drink in his hand.  He didn't want to admit it but he was at least toying with the idea.

She sutured him.

She closed him up.  All the bits and pieces of the day, the glass shards of stress, the mind-numbing sameness...she flushed them out and quickly sewed him shut, disallowing any return of the grit...the dark colored snow pushed to the sides of the highway, ugly with salt and road sludge.  

He remembered one time when they were driving in Carsley...passing the Methodist church...she was younger, a passenger in a boy's car and they hadn't strayed outside the lines....but as they passed, in the warmth of a sunset she mentioned she'd like to be married there.

So long ago.

He liked to return to that car ride now and again...just the innocent juices of two teens mingling in the minds where no actual physical touch had yet happened.  It was the imagination that was the most beguiling...the unknown...the seduction of what might be...

Until the plain tipped...and she wasn't there as much...seasonal.  Blooming.  He occasioned upon her...and she stood out like the roses grown wild around some abandoned house...flowering, contrasting...making everything ugly beside her regardless...and she didn't notice until he told her.

But she was the salve...her own quiet, unremarkable presence that mattered way more than he intended.  She wrapped him as easily as a bandage...some friction envelopment that staved off a bleed...was like a finger or a hand wrapped around his...

It was often in the evenings when he allowed the door to his quiet mind get opened...a quiet squeal of a doorknob that opened into a dusty room....the raising of a shade facing the east in the morning, a yellowish bright light that spilled in accordingly.

She invaded his thoughts like that...and as much as he tried to push them away with a wave of bourbon they persisted...her voice in the car talking about a ceremony in the church, the way she slide across the car to kiss him, the way she glanced over her shoulder to smile at him in a departure...close-lipped grin like sharing a secret.

It burned when she left...each and every time...like a quick flare if you graze a cigarette accidentally.   A slight red spot, a burn...skin.

And her return...a milky glaze across said burn, a lotion to soothe...a wound to suture...a clench around the pain that numbed.  

He sipped the last bits of bourbon and set the drink down with an echo of crystal against wood...in the quiet it sounded louder...emptier.  

He felt bled out.  He needed her nearby to feel something.  Anything.

Digestive Juices

 

He loved to watch her eat...it was a rarity given how distances kept them apart so when together the priority was in being as close as possible to each other and that was usually frowned upon in restaurants.  But the occasion did occur and he remembered each time how much he enjoyed it...

the delicate hold of the fork, the arc movement of her arm to bring her hand towards her mouth, the slight opening of it and the quick disappearance of the food...her slight chew and then the process would repeat itself....she would usually move the napkin across her lips despite not needing to and fold it neatly in her lap...she was a very tidy eater, a very dainty one.  

Sometimes, not often, she would answer a question or speak slightly with the food in the corner of her cheek, as if to emphasize a point or utter a laugh...this was usually when eating pizza or other hand-held food, sitting on the trunk of his car in the parking lot of a beach or something like that...the normal courtesies of restaurant etiquette thrown away.  Kissing her after a bite of a taco, tasting the food on her lips, a closed-mouth kiss that usually was drawn up in a smile.  Food rarely connected them but when it did it was memorable...a private party.  The table with the view...a quiet corner when the noise was mostly the sound of a utensil against china...they could eat in silence, enjoying the private space.

Half of watching her eat was to enjoy her devouring something, even if devoured in the slowest most congenial manner...like the food had long surrendered and accepted its fate to find itself upon her tongue, gliding past her teeth until they clenched and became minced and silenced down her throat.

He particularly enjoyed when she loved the dish...her head slightly forward as if to get closer...a little more frequency with the fork, more quietness in the conversation...when looking up her eyes were shining and there might even be a bit of the sauce or the juice or whatever liquid was immersed alighting on her chin.  She would smile, embarrassed...the napkin coming up again.

Mostly though he just loved watching her mouth...a mouth he knew...a mouth that was responsive...a mouth that when troubled was a taut thin line...when saddened turned down and maybe shivering in a cry...but in a certain quiet moment, when her mouth was upon his he could feel her energy...her cascading warmth...and if her mouth dare parted slightly he knew exactly what it was like to be devoured.

She looked up from her food.  

What? she said, sitting down her fork.

Nothing...he replied...nothing at all.