City

 It was raining in New York...the city.

It was like hot dog water...cloudy, mixed with scents and smells and while it washed away the streets it just made it a slippery mix of grime and parts of the city that would remain unwashed despite the deluge.

She was far.

Plucked felt like the most appropriate word...pulled from him.  It was always amazing how this city of over 8 million people and hundreds of skyscrapers could make him miss her even more...like the most benign of things...the way she formed words, the way she had the low laugh...visiting this city was the road-rash burn of the skin of his heart that had scabbed over...only to fall in exactly the same spot and bring blood again.

It was an itch...it was clawing from inside...to not be surrounded by strangers but rather the heat of her proximity.  Like the sand inside the clam that makes the pearl...let us be cloistered by the entirety of the ocean and spend time together...ages...and yield something beautiful...jewel-like.

Against this backdrop of a city...this spitting rain, making the streets blacker, the horizons grayer...the color of steel-wool...with just a simple drink in a quiet bar it felt like hell...a dismantled disorganized world that was filled with unfamiliar faces and nameless people.  All around him.

She felt fresh to him.  Not like a touch but an envelopment.  Swaddling.

That type of clutch that you look back upon...a long goodbye...just prior when you press your body...you pull one into you...fully clothed or whatever...that so-long at the airport...right before departures.  It is just a second longer than appropriate because it is meant to convey the inappropriate.

She was light upon him...not in a flashlight sense but in a dimmed one...turned low into an evening...when the room goes from yellows to mellow.  The way the room goes dark as one undresses...the lingering shadows more revealing than intended...the sweet simple fashion of two in bed going to sleep and a reach-over to the lamp to allow them to join in the dark.

She was a presence...a small weight beside.  A brush against in a hallway...hands grazed.  The weight of a stare.

She was time...passing it when near like micro-seconds only to feel whole decades when apart...not even seasonal like snow and fall...the time of a firefly in a summer evening.

She was far...and as spit rattled down upon the city he heard sirens and horns of a thousand others who couldn't even imagine the way the night might have been.