Echoes

 He awoke in the grey that plastered the city in its shawl, pulled up to its chin, trying to kick off the cold of the morning and knowing there would be no sunrise.  There would be no smooth transition from the nighttime to the day.  No handshake of relinquishing the end of something and the new beginning.

He was cold.

And he knew that she wasn't anywhere close.

Surrounded by millions is a bit like being a kid in the McDonald's playpen, surrounded by balls of colors that are just adornments...hoping you don't get infected by something, someone.  High up above the avenues of the city he hoped for quiet...no sirens, no horns.  Just the smooth sounds of the heat perhaps coming on.

In the awakening of an early morning, the brain craves warmth...comfort...peace.  He felt absence...a gap. He wasn't awake enough to clutch the day yet...but he had resigned himself that the sleep was dead.  It was a gray, blank area when the mind becomes singularly focused.

She came into view.

Well, not her per se, but her presence.  Her curves as she lay horizontal...her warmth, her breath.  A small dent in the mattress beside him...a murmur of breathing...asleep.  It was like she could place her hand on his fast beating heart and calm him...that she could pull him into her and become entangled...

He squinted at the clock...4am.

Too early to rise.

He imagined her near...the scent of her hair and her profile...he could almost imagine her breathing patterns and tried to mimic them...be her mirror...he might even tug her over, have her envelope him...maybe hear her murmur something in her sleep.

But in his male mind he ultimately remembered mutterings of her bliss, and when he had pleased her and in the quiet corridors of New York they echoed in his mind, and he craved the sounds in his ear, the dense heat of proximity, the feel of her against him and the way he placed his mouth over hers to quell her to a quietness that he was now listening to in a room with a view.

It was grey outside his window...but in his mind it was a season like summer and he let her burn herself on him like so many orange embers, echoing in his thoughts and limbs and burning into his memory. 

Winter Solstice

 

When the earth reaches its maximum tilt away from the sun...it is furthest from the glow.  It is the same in every departure of hers as his world grew cold each time, a perma-frost that remained until her silhouette broke across his horizon again.

She nestled in his mind like a cat, furled up and warm, curled up and cozy.  She had started out so very small in his world, barely a brick and now had created something extraordinarily beautiful, a cathedral where he could practice his faith in her...his devotion.  His religion.

An art museum, where he could walk echoing stretches of marble flooring and gaze at perspectives of her...lit by memories and painted in permanence that he could revisit time and again...and each time together added new hallways, new facades in this never ending art of her.

An opulent hotel, but with only one large penthouse suite...with a massive claw-foot tub that overlooked massive city lights...an array of scented candles arranged nearby, with steam arising off the waters that would envelope them...the heat of the waters mirroring the heat of her, when immersed in her.  The slight beads of sweat across a brow, the tips of her hair darkening in the water...

A winter cabin, with no internet access or even phone service, with plenty of split firewood ripened to burn...with outdoor flood lights that illuminate a blizzard...a bed by the window laden with heavy blankets and a fridge filled with liquor.  A calendar with a black marker to measure time in days versus hours...and let those hours be spent together, engulfed in conversation and quietness.

A porch at sunset, oriented to the west, with a bottle of bourbon and a bucket of ice.

A towel on a beach.

The agonizingly empty places that existed when not together...but when together, anywhere, would embody all the places he ever wished he could be.

Good Morning

You say good morning to strangers...you politely await the glance, the brief recognition that their eyes are locked on yours, even if just for the briefest of moments...although if they glance away you only need to nod your head in acknowledgment...but if they linger a bit past a second and maybe even start to cock a smile then you unleash it with full intent.

And there is only so much time for this window of greeting...I don't think people generally say good afternoon or good evening...they say goodnight when closing a child's door or when hanging up the phone after dinner.  It is a hopeful term where as good afternoon/evening are polite bit of rhetoric that could be solved by merely saying hello or hi.

She liked to say hi, at all hours.  First thing in the morning or when we came up for air after an elongated kiss.

It was a friendly greeting, simple and intimate.  Probably the shortest way to say something but it carried in her tone something so much deeper...almost to the point where you felt like it was exclusive to you.

and it usually was because she saved it for when there was no distance between us...and we had come to find ourselves there...interlocked, intertwined.  Like we had discovered a reveal...unraveled a bow around a box and found sudden treasure.

It wasn't a code we spoke...although at times he had to pull words out of her like hard steel nails rusted into weathered wood.  But over time words occasionally spilled unexpectedly, a break in a dam...and he grasped for them like one attempts to catch water or rain...an impossible feat but he could feel tiny bits hitting his hands and his fingers but mostly they fell away and soon evaporated.

And there was the one time, the first time...when she calmly asked do you wanna make love?

As casual as asking to pass the salt, as comfortable as asking to turn up the heat...but in this case the spice and the source of warmth were her and it was an offering...no shyness, no ambiguity.  Declarative.  Yet in her soft spoken notes it was gentle and affirming.  She already knew the answer.  But hearing it inside my mind I finally did catch the rain, I finally clutched the water and I got to hold it in my hands and consume it, breathe it in, bask in it...and it wasn't even really a question as much as it was an invitation.