Scarlet

Bleed into me...bleed into my thoughts, blend into my mind.  Bleed into my eyes, disguised as tears, bleed into my day, disguised as daylight.  Bleed into my evening, a cloak around the sun, bleed into darkness as a cloud scuttles across a star.

Bleed into me the hot pulse of blood, the living you...a reminder.  Bleed into me your fragrance, bleed into me your distance.

Bleed into me the spiraling memory, when you and I were about to kiss, when you and I were so close I could see the pulse in your neck, the dilation in your eyes...our breath mingling, our lips just centimeters apart and our blood boiling inside of us...hot of us, hot for us...when distance was just a pinprick away.

Now just a papercut, a nuisance...perhaps not even drawing blood, perhaps devoid of the heated fluid that swam strangely, like a fever...a pox, a hotflash...the pooling of warmth in cheeks, in a flush, and in the parts of us we don't talk about in public.

When you and I were so tantalizingly close, when there was a roar in our ears, when our eyes were slowly closing preemptively and in those fading moments I could almost hear your heartbeat, almost hear its echo.

I could sense the scarlet in you, see the scarlet in you. 

In these winter skies, or almost-winter skies, in the grays and in the whites, in the plumes of fogs and exhaust pipes, there is such an absence of the reds of you...the scarlets of you, blood-signs, life-lines.  Blood lines.  Such a contrast it could be, almost as a moon against a sky.  But a moon is bloodless, lifeless...it is a cold veneer, despite its beauty.

You have traded with that moon, and remain cold in my sky, frozen in my mind...a light not from you but from some other sun.  Not a blood line, not a lifeline.  A reminder.  A pale bone, a pale shine, that still remains beautiful...but empty...drained.

And I search it, I explore it, daring it in the night sky to reveal just a pulse, reveal just a hint.  Something to show me that it is alive, something to indicate the travel of blood from a vein to a heart, something to reveal a tiny smoldering. 

Something, in the grays and in the whites, that it is not quite dead, that it is not quite gone.  Something, perhaps just any thing, that appears and it might be no bigger than a pinprick.

But in that tear-shaped drop I feel the pulse of you, albeit distant, but alive, and beckoning, and in its rhythm I count the sequence of time that pulls me back into the place when our eyelashes were touching, our lips were almost and in between us our blood slowly boiled just beneath the surface.