The Shape of You...

I'm not a big fan of the Ed Sheeran song...but I find his premise appealing.

In love with the shape of you.

It's the instantaneous recognition...the darkened room silhouette.  The familiar.

It is far from routine...rather, it is quite the opposite.  If I had even the luxury of daily...weekly...monthly views, I'd perhaps feel spoiled, feel that I didn't deserve.

Most likely I don't.

I must have failed in projecting what the image means when it is near me, when it closes, when it gathers.  When you are in the same proximity, I must have failed to tell you of the eclipse of all other things...all others.

High beam like in a posture that makes me slightly blink but not look away...you capture.

Mesmerize.  Compel.  And it is in the recognizable outline of you...especially approaching.

Because the same outline departing is exquisitely sad.  Suffocating.  Extinguishing.

You blot the sun.

You blind me in one eye.

The outline of you must be the same feeling explorers felt, adrift at sea for days, months and even years, staring at the blue slate horizon unbroken by land or by shape, high up in a crow's nest and following the sun again and again...the complete unbroken routine of an ocean with no end in sight....moving slowly, steadily, but routinely mind-numbingly consistent.

My days...

And then, with the sweet outburst from a lookout, a slight irregular shape on the far horizon.  Something breaking apart the horizon.

The potential...the untapped.  The different.

The same emotion when I see the shape of you fix in my frame and approach me.

Age

The toast of the town. 

I love coming back to this city. I love coming back in time. I realize that the love I feel for this city is a love over time. Love over time conquers. It creates a mesh of memories. It thickens and binds. 

This city is an old love. It has history. Heartbreak. It reminds me. 

But it doesn't age me. Rather, after a birthday weekend it reminds me to raise a toast to love over time. Love over decades. Expanses. 

Returning to New York is a homecoming. It returns me to a time when I am ageless. 

That is what defines such an exquisite relation. 

And so deserving of this raised glass 

Editor's Note

Dear reader, I did not suddenly  sit down and pound out a bunch of new pieces.

Rather, I just tied off some drafts that I felt I could release...I quite often try to force myself to contribute something frequently...but in the middle of it I sometimes lose my mojo.   It's not an excuse...I just feel it's not quite ready.

Most of the time I do it all in one sitting, and just let the flow take the words and craft whatever I'm thinking...to me it is like jazz....freedom and one-time notes that cannot be captured or put back for editing.

It's probably the single biggest reason why I will never make it as a writer...I hate to change the things that I initially create and do not want them to be altered.

Align

She was laying alongside him, her head just along his breastbone, and her hair was spilling upon him.  He was holding bits and pieces of it in his hands, splayed between his fingers, moving from the top of her head down to her shoulders.  He could see the white scalp, the shades of hair color starting and then moving in colors away from the part-line.

Every now and then he would open his palm and slide it down the length of her hair, like he was smoothing out the ends. Sometimes he just rested his hand slightly behind her ear, and let his fingers trace the hairline from their until it disappeared into the tapering behind her neck.

His chest moved slightly, because she was extremely light against him, and she molded onto him like she was pressed from an iron, warming, clinging, but slowly and gradually.  Melting.  Butter into the crevices of hot corn on the cob.  Rivulets of waffle-mix spilling and bubbling into the streets of the griddle.  When she was against him, in these quiet and effortless moments, he often felt like they shared each other...like a part of him was strung into her, and he needed to feel her breathe for him to breathe...that he needed to watch her pulse beat sweetly in her neck for him to metronome his own heart.

She breathed in, he breathed out.

What are you doing up there?  She murmured against the tee shirt of his chest, and she said it like she had suddenly awakened.  He had never been the first voice she had spoken to in a morning, but he had always known how it might sound.  Or at least he had hoped.

I'm admiring your scalp.

She tilted her head upwards, and he saw down her forehead, the angle of her nose, the rise of the cheekbones seen from above.


I'm pretty sure it's like all the others you've seen.

You'd be wrong.

Why?  Have I got something in my hair?

No...no.  You've got beautiful hair.  Nothing to worry about.  All good from up here.

She moved her head so it went back down, he couldn't tell if she was looking at something or had her eyes closed.


I was just finding a part of you that I had never really noticed he offered up.

You're taller than me...you get lots of time to study my hairline.

One would think...but it's where the scent of shampoo lingers the most, where the conditioners moisten and...condition, I suppose.

They're doing their job...this feels like an inspection.

He stopped.  Hardly.  I'd call it admiring.  I always love the different parts of you that make up the whole...but I will stop for now.

Thank you.

He didn't tell her that he did it to remind him that she was real, that she was there...that she had skin that could be cut, that she could bleed, that she wasn't just this part of his imagination but rather delicate and glaringly real.

A Storm to Wake to

It was well after midnight, well past the point that they had ascended upstairs, and intertwined themselves on the double bed.  They slept back to back, an indicator of the mood, as some reluctance had gently undone some things...he imagined ribbons of two different colors that had been tightly tied.  Now they were dangling, just barely touching each other.

Her house in Wakefield faced north, so that the slow arc of the sun traced itself from right to left across her yard.  The prevailing winds usually came in the opposite direction, westward...so it was usually a surprise to be immersed in a storm...you couldn't watch it come in like a distant ship that starts like that dot on the horizon.

So as he had listened to her breathing become a rhythm, his awareness of her nearby and being asleep, he was almost there when the slight rumble came from outside.  Hesitant to jostle the bed he slowly turned and soon he was flat on his back, watching the ceiling, waiting for the storm to arrive.

It wasn't too long.

He counted the beats between the flashes and the thunder and could tell it was moving quickly towards them.  She was still asleep as he glanced over and saw her shoulders rising slightly with her sleep breathing.  He wanted to say something, wanted to gently wake her...but in this peace before the evening exploded he stayed quiet...wanting her to keep these moments to her...not him.

The room suddenly lit up like a thousand floodlights flashed once and then immediately turned off, while in that blinding blink a bomb went off in the boom of a thunder cracking the evening in two.  He felt her body jump slightly and she let out a small almost child-like noise.  It had scared her.

He flipped to his right and put his arm around her.

She didn't resist.

For the next 20 minutes he held her, and when the blinking whites from the weather finally stopped she was back asleep against him.

Finally he reluctantly went to sleep...trying to dream exactly what he was doing with her right then and there.

Another Day...just like Any Other One

There were small signs, indicators...but he tried to turn them, reverse them.

She mentioned in comments, little lines about little lines...laugh lines, little parts of her she was worried about...a change that was enveloping her.

He reminded her to go out at night and watch a star...find a planet...look at a shiny, gorgeous sight and realize it was thousands of years old.

She always countered "if I was that far away I'd be beautiful too."

And he always said "the closer you are the finer you are."  And he meant it.

But it was hard to convince her.

But he also knew he would never stop trying.

Nuthin'

What are you thinking about?

....


...


Nothing.


That's not true at all of course...I'm watching the clouds pull from themselves like cotton candy tugged by invisible fingers as the storm breaks apart and small patches of blue emerge.

I'm listening to the helicopter slowly lower itself to the roof of the nearby hospital, then I'm wondering if the person inside is going to live.  I then wonder how many people are dying in the hospital even now, completely invisible to me...their lives just fading hundreds of feet away from me.

It is not depressing...it is life...it's not nothing.  It's not nothing at all.

I'm discovering new music, new genres...newer lighter combinations with no vocals, soothing and stimulating at the same time...perfect for studying...perfect for reading...perfect for crafting a bit of the pieces of papier mache that form a paragraph for you.  A form, a construct.

I'm dispensing time in an afternoon, drips like those spilled by a dropper...water dripping from the spigot in a tub.  Eaves still dripping from an afternoon storm.

The spread of you across my mind...layered, thinly but cleanly across the ridges in my mind.

Maybe at times spiking, maybe at other times ebbing.

But never...

Never....

Nothing.