Oxygen

What she didn't know was after a kiss, when they retreated briefly to find each other's eyes and find the iris and study the dark colors is he would breathe in very lightly, like hoping to pull even more of her into him, like her essence, like her air, like her exhalations that could be just one more thing, one more piece, one more part of her that he could consume.

And it could be only in those moments, in that proximity...that sacred air that he could pretend.

Phone lines and email...like bottled air...like those pneumatic tubes used in bank deposits...put your money and deposit slip in and it whooshed away from you to some mysterious vault and be returned with a receipt....just the to's and fro's of a day or a week of distance...

Like reverse CPR...somebody is not breathing into you but rather drawing your breath out and it is a cold and far away feeling. 

Drowning...being away from her was drowning...like watching someone just beneath the surface...that was him...he couldn't find the air...and maybe above him she was watching, unable to help.

That cold, cold distance was a pollutant...a fog.  An air uninhabitable for long...the death zone on Everest...being apart was that space...outer space...airless, without oxygen.

Breathing became a chore...work became a dungeon...a tightened collar. 

No wonder the heart and the lungs remain so close in proximity...they feed off each other, turn blood red from blue...become dependent.

She had smash-grabbed his heart long ago...pummeled the outside glass, reached in with robber's gloves and clenched it in a victory grasp.  So know he needed her to breathe as well...to sustain. 

And in absences he weakened...sickened....his fine heart beating bravely in her clutch...

And only in her return, her proximity, her mouth upon his would she provide the restorative breath that would re-awaken him...return him from his pieces...revive him and remind him of the very oxygen that she had become.