Small Pours

No image for this one.
Just some words barely scripted but still bee-sting stung from a clench or a craving.

Just pouring out the remnants of your leftover drink into mine.
Just so I can have a bit of something that glanced your lips be poured into something that I can now consume.

It's a small pour. A measure. A treasure.

But it's now gone and apparently so are you. Except for that small pour that is now resident inside of me.

The Rarities

In the departure all that remained were the remnants of the drinks they had shared, slightly broken circles of watermarks left on the table, his glass still slightly filled and slowly melting like the rest of the evening.

He listened to the high piano keys of ice against itself in his glass and wondered if he should pour himself some more.  The lights were just coming on in the city. 

It was a vacancy...a void.  For every amount of times she had gone away he remembered them like they were natural...they were fluid, expected.  Just another sweep of hour hands and a moment when she had to go.  But in the meantime he had sweetened the minutes together.

But this time was different.  It was rarer.  Rather, the plucked away feeling was stronger...interrupted.  She had slipped from his hands like in a torrent...and her absence was a toxin.  It was cloying.

It was probably because the room had matched the perfect hue of her evening eyes and now there was just a broad darkening.

A starless event.  A twilight with a blankness.

He was struck by the rarity of that impact...the ache that had just been caught as a craving.  He supposed it shouldn't have surprised him but it did. 

The moments had been brief, just a bit longer than a dance, but the slight angles and familiar scents were reminders...they were markers.  Not muscle memory but rather perhaps antiques...that were finally dusted off, wires still intact and suddenly plugged into an outlet and sprung into white bright light.

It was a rarity.  It was exceedingly different.
But there was enough of the familiar for him to remember some times when she returned...and he clung to that with white bright hopes in an evening dimming and dying altogether.

sikuaq

sikuaq:  from the Inuit meaning "small ice", referring to the the first layer of thin ice that forms on puddles.


I feel like when I talk to you that it's like yesterday when we last spoke...like we can pick up a conversation even if we haven't spoken in weeks...she started...

or months he added

or months she slightly murmured, her voice trailing as she pulled the glass to her lips, the ice and the bourbon making a slight disturbance against the crystal.

The evening was in the first full days after Daylight Savings kicked in, adding its brief jet-lag feel to each day, but allowing for the sky to grow lighter despite it growing later.

Well anyways...I do enjoy just the lightness of our conversations...they're easy to have.

He walked away from the edge of the pick up, he had turned it around on the hill so the bed was towards the west...he pulled the latch down and the drinks were poured on the tailgate.  A bottle of Woodford and a bag of 7-11 ice...a small bag.  But he had brought two heavy crystal glasses, mottled almost a clear but slightly blue.  She had asked for more ice than bourbon.  He had a small cube that was losing its battle against the liquor.

I think it's because we are just staying on the polite skim he said.  He was away from her, so he had to turn his head to throw his comment.  She was leaning against the truck.  Behind her was darkening...but she still was a bit of a glow.

Polite skin?  What is that?

Not skin...skim.  A thin sheet of ice.  

Ice?

Ice.  The build up of ice between us.

He finished his current drink...drinks are either current, past or future.  His was gone now so he ambled back towards her...he put a few cubes out of the plastic bag into his glass and poured enough to cover all of them.

What ice between us?  It was like hearing her whisper.  It was a question, for sure.  But she knew the answer.  She had been a part in its creation.

He looked at her, over the rim of his glass.  He walked closer to her and gently clanked his crystal against hers.  The reason the conversations are so easy is because we are not discussing the hard.

She looked at him, then down.

Why do they have to be hard...she said it in the declarative...not a question, a statement.

They don't have to be...actually they could be fairly opposite.  But...well...he walked around, his arm extended as his glass waved across the horizon...perhaps the ice that has grown between us isn't quite thick enough to shield it from breaking easily.

She took her own glass and finished it.  She set it down on the tailgate where it made a slight tinkle with the ice still inside.

I am not a fan of those things, those comparisons.  

You never were.

I don't like the ice reference.

You never should.

So what should I do?

He walked back over towards her...setting his glass down he put a few cubes in her glass and held up the bottle with a "should I" look as he held it over hers.  She nodded slightly.  He poured a small amount...more ice, less bourbon.

Behind her the west was quieting...the tiniest hints of daylight were being slowly packed into a growing big box of blacks and grays.  Her hair, freshly cut into a new slight style was skirting around her.  But her eyes...his most favorite,..were smoldering.  She, unlike the Inuits and their million words weren't even comparable as she could say an infinite amount of things to him with just a brief glance.

He just rarely saw it anymore.  And it was a slight pierce when it alighted on him.

Forget what I said he started.

About?

About the ice.  It's not real.

Yes.  You said it.

True.  I cannot take it back.  But he held the glass up.  There was a ton of ice in here and it's gone.  

So I'm now a liquor?

He regarded her for a second.  He took a sip and swallowed and closed the slight distance between them.  He pushed onto her slightly and put his lips on her mouth.  He lingered for just a moment, just barely until he felt her relax and draw hers together and kissed him back.

No he said.  But I will always find you intoxicating.  And you can erase every bit of time, every skim of snow and ice with just allowing me to be able to do that so I can never let such things get into the way again.

I cannot help it.  

I know.  You'll just have to let me find you when the cold sets in.

It was almost shadow dark at that point, and he pulled her towards him, a move she remembered and gathered into him, her one arm around him, both of his around her waist.  He whispered about loving her new hair cut, about dreaming of her in evenings and she smiled slightly as she watched the moon come up behind them and she wondered if there was a time when the daylight literally stood still.  She wondered as it collapsed around them.

The Scrape of Airports

The names of cities remind me of places that I have seen and places I have yet to see. 

I look for the one that I'm currently in...and it feels like an ache.

It isn't a distance or a latitude.  It's not a time zone.  I think sadness is measured in depths, like how we measure the ocean in atmospheres.  It is a plunging weighted feeling that seems like the lure of gravity and it just gets tiring.

It's not missing something, or misplacing something.  It is something sawed off...tin-snip cutting into skin and bone and roughly removing and placing in a metal tray. 

Like snapping a green twig in half, but it doesn't snap in two...you're left with sinew and stringy matter and you twist and you pull until it breaks apart....it is a reluctance. 

It is not a departure, nor an arrival.  It is a removal.  It is a deletion. 

A name in pencil vigorously rubbed with an eraser, leaving bits of paper and dust in its wake.

I sit in the airport and feel like I am not really coming back.  I'm not returning to a time.  I am away. 

The airport scrapes against me as I watch the trudge of others perhaps returning to a place they cannot wait to return to. 

I await the cold emptiness of a place not even still lukewarm from your shadow.  A place you might have been...a place we were once.

I board the plane knowing that for a brief time I am no longer on the earth and therefore I am as far away from you as I can be.

And when I land I will be where you are and I will return to the place that I still recall with pain.