Echoes

 He awoke in the grey that plastered the city in its shawl, pulled up to its chin, trying to kick off the cold of the morning and knowing there would be no sunrise.  There would be no smooth transition from the nighttime to the day.  No handshake of relinquishing the end of something and the new beginning.

He was cold.

And he knew that she wasn't anywhere close.

Surrounded by millions is a bit like being a kid in the McDonald's playpen, surrounded by balls of colors that are just adornments...hoping you don't get infected by something, someone.  High up above the avenues of the city he hoped for quiet...no sirens, no horns.  Just the smooth sounds of the heat perhaps coming on.

In the awakening of an early morning, the brain craves warmth...comfort...peace.  He felt absence...a gap. He wasn't awake enough to clutch the day yet...but he had resigned himself that the sleep was dead.  It was a gray, blank area when the mind becomes singularly focused.

She came into view.

Well, not her per se, but her presence.  Her curves as she lay horizontal...her warmth, her breath.  A small dent in the mattress beside him...a murmur of breathing...asleep.  It was like she could place her hand on his fast beating heart and calm him...that she could pull him into her and become entangled...

He squinted at the clock...4am.

Too early to rise.

He imagined her near...the scent of her hair and her profile...he could almost imagine her breathing patterns and tried to mimic them...be her mirror...he might even tug her over, have her envelope him...maybe hear her murmur something in her sleep.

But in his male mind he ultimately remembered mutterings of her bliss, and when he had pleased her and in the quiet corridors of New York they echoed in his mind, and he craved the sounds in his ear, the dense heat of proximity, the feel of her against him and the way he placed his mouth over hers to quell her to a quietness that he was now listening to in a room with a view.

It was grey outside his window...but in his mind it was a season like summer and he let her burn herself on him like so many orange embers, echoing in his thoughts and limbs and burning into his memory.