Casualness

Maybe because it is a Monday, or rather the Sunday before the start of the work week that makes us a tad exhausted already.

We glance upon each other like a skipped stone thrown across a pond...a few hits here and there ultimately to sink to the bottom and join the others.

There is a bit of casualness in our interactions...a bit of subtlety and brush-bys.  It is not necessarily forged in the daily dose, the repetitiveness of seeing each other all the time.

Is that what makes it special?  The casualness?

I don't know.  It feels like there should be more...more connection.  More attention.  But in the lack of it there is a comfort. A casual sense of being.  Like when you're beside the ocean.  It is familiar.  It is something you've seen.  But it delivers the expected.  It isn't a surprise.

You are the tides of my day.  Highs and lows.

You remain constant...despite inconsistencies.

A north star, I'd guess.

But distant.

I think you give me what you can.  In your casual nature.

And I scurry to pick it up and collect it and build out a structure that I can call familiar.

I collect those brush-bys.  They are the orbit of the planets to the sun to me.

Vegas Echoes

He had a roll of quarters.

Before the days of mobile phones and cellular towers there were phone booths and kiosks...places where you would dial a rotary phone and talk to an operator and determine a distance...and coins would be added one by one and they would tinkle in the system and then you would hear a ringing and then you'd be connected...if somebody picked up.

No caller ID.  No preview.

Somebody was calling.  Perhaps it's important.

He only knew that if he were to try to call her he needed to ensure he had enough coin.  Enough time to tell her.  He didn't want to run out of quarters to convey.

He had no other money, he had made some mistakes and he was running out of lines.  He had a few items and some prayers.

She was one of the latter.

He knew she might not pick up...knew that she might not acknowledge.

But simply he wanted her to know that in his mind he was already connected to her and that the call was simply perfunctory... mechanical.

He looked in his hand and the stack of quarters was a neat roll.  Each represented close to five minutes apiece...he figured this was worth an hour of discussion.

She would never talk that long.

Almost a Spring

There is the moment when a match is struck against the side of a matchbox, the slight click and the sudden hiss of a flame...it is usually quiet but then it is applied against the awaiting cylinder of tobacco and then it flares as she inhales...

She inhaled...a deep inhalation that revealed it had been a long week.  Exceptionally long.  She wore her frustration like a color...a gray that wore on her.

But to him it was an orange.  It was the color of the match, the end of the cigarette.  She blew the smoke plume at him, an indication that he was around.  She brushed some hair from her eyes...she had recently had a haircut and a color, and her fingers were still trying to figure out the best look.  Regardless  the hair mirrored her eyes and it was warming.  Chocolate.

She looked tired.  Mostly in her eyes,  a sense of things.  Not in her skin or her face.  Rather she wore thin in her stare.

She half smiled at him, apologizing for her quietness.

He got up, leaned over and kissed her.  She tasted of her day...her smoke, her hours.  She tasted of the lack of sleep and she tasted like her usual candy.

Against her, behind her a sky exploded and turned colors against hours...there was a rumor of a Nor'easter and it was getting old...this cold.

But the mash up of his lips and hers, the burn of her flaring cigarette and the smoothness he was trying to bring to her were a warmth.

She was trying not to slowly melt.

He was trying to heat her from the inside.

She inhaled and blew purple smoke towards him...he accepted anything that had once been inside of her.

Mona Lisa Smile

It was an afternoon.

God.

It was a sun filled spring.  A day where you could drink in the daylight, let the sun spill its juices into an afternoon.  Car windows reflecting diatribes of light, blinks...flashes.

The phone call had been somewhat suggestive. He had painted a picture that had crossed a line.  A suggestion.  A coercion.

At this point words between them were mere precursors.  Rather, when their bodies met the words just melted.  The bodies took over and replaced syncopation.  Rhythm.  Don't talk, just let my tongue tell you what is next.

It was rapture.  It was sublime.  It is interesting the angles a body takes when a body takes over.  When a resistance gives in to a pull...or a tug.  A push.

It is really in the breathing if you think about it...the simple exhilaration of parted lips against some other's.  When enveloping creates tension, and there becomes few parts that are not touching.

She had mentioned a Gap skirt, it had uneven cuts on its end, the color of khaki.  It was a summer skirt, meant to be worn in a day much warmer.  It was casual, maybe provocative.

But in remembering he remembered that the greeting was intimately familiar.  You know when you know.  The body remembers.  The heart, the pulse...most importantly the brain flips a toggle switch that simply says "i remember this and I enjoy it".

Man, was it enjoyable. Incredible.  Like two pieces that fit.  The last piece of a lifelong puzzle. Solving.

That is what she did.  She solved.  She completed sentences.  She completed mysteries.

She solved a sweet ton of his issues...she spread solvent and bandaged wounds.  She poured herself in tiny, barely perceptible pieces into him.  She rarely exposed but when she did it was redemptive.

So when she climbed into the back of his car that day, the Gap skirt high on her thighs and the tiny triangle revealing she wore nothing underneath was an eclipse of the sun on his day.  She knew she was on the edge of the normal and she was balancing just a bit off of it.

The day was bright blue and with few clouds.  It was warmish, the type of day when you could go outside without a coat, without a sweater.  It was a day to drink in the colors, the sweet air.  It was a spring, a new beginning.

But his mind was summer.  Heat and humidity.  Fulsome.  Sweating. Reminders.

He glanced at her eyes, dark and dancing.  Her smile was fixed, tight lipped and daring.  She was daring him.

She had such confidence.

He was a bit more than smitten, and tried to drive safely to a place where he could avoid colliding...only to ultimately collide with something he was ready to meet head-on.

Where the Sea Meets the Sky

She had a  penchant for water...oceans, rivers, she photographed them in droves, usually at sunset or sunrise, the day starting or concluding.   She felt very carefully that she captured them in the moment, that one exact second when the shutter clicked and the picture emerged...she didn't try to really capture a scene, she was trying to capture and carefully preserve a feeling.

She had shared with him a picture of the water when the sky, the land and the ocean were almost a single color, an unedited view of landscape beneath her feet to far above her head.  She was incredibly delighted that it was captured as she had seen it...was mesmerized by the singleness of the colors, the way it felt like a single brush-stroke.

Driving away from her later that night, he imagined her as the landscape, the ocean, her dark eyes the suns that lured his gaze upwards and blurred her into a brush-stroke.  As familiar as he was with her singleness of colors he still could remember each moment, as if the cadence of the heart or the exhilaration in his mind was frozen in an image.  In his throat he could still remember the tension as he lingered upon her, his mind unfreezing the image and allowing the quickening of a pulse and the restoration of heat and warmth throughout him.  She was by no means any simple picture, but he had stored her visage into his mind so many times that he could easily conjure it up and she would be a resplendent image that never changed.  She was preserved, beautifully...carefully.  But mostly as a feeling...and he loved that the most.

2 lovers on a street

Coming home I saw two lovers on the street.

You could tell...you could trust.  There was no gap between them, they fit, they melded.  They molded into each other like a billion puzzle pieces finding a home.

They were not caring about my stare as I walked by...rather their eyes were full of each other, drinking in each other like an addiction that was being unleashed.

They may have been recent lovers...they may have been lovers of old.  But the aura and the tension of them was palpable.  Like a third rail electricity.  Like that copper smell when a transformer is over-heating.

I was in a wind, a cold draft that swept along the street that was filled with strangers...the homeless, the late workers, the dreary and the pale.  People were just blobs moving around me, colors muted and eyes averted.

But they were on a corner, like a bloom.  Like fresh pastels added to a black and white photograph.  They were honey to bees.

I remembered a line from a song that I had sent her..."and I ached for my heart like some tin man".  It was an emptiness, a wringing out of something wrought...a reveal.  Like she had plucked and removed a piece of me that only she could possess.  And when together she would politely place it in its proper place and make me whole...but she had to be there to do it...without her I was incomplete.

I watched these two lovers on the street and knew that they were whole.  I could see it in their bodies as they formed the shape of a question mark against each other.  They wrapped.  Immersed.  Their legs intertwined, in the cool of an evening.  They were probably warm.

They were police-siren reminders and tornado warning sounds to your absence.  The empty fuckingly empty space.

I walked past them, pretended to ignore them, hating them for the very image that I craved and could still faintly remember and could still conjure up but it still felt half-assed.

Simple fact was I needed you beside to restore.  But that wasn't happening for now.

I zipped up my coat and collected it around my throat as the evening had suddenly grown colder.

spray cans

I see the overpass, the white brick buildings...unremarkable, undistinguished.  I see blank spaces and I see voids.

I see a blank dawn, a vanilla sky.  I see a cloud with imperfections...I see a road with blemishes and potholes.  The backs of cars with taillights.

I see front doors, garage doors that I enter time and time again...I recognize the room view, recognize the shapes.  I see the melting of all things that are familiar into a recognizable lump.  I see them colorless, gray and ordinary.

I see the pale people, the strangers and the familiar.  I sense their sameness.  They are all the same.

It's like in my pocket of my coat is a can of spray paint...an iridescent color...provocative.  Evoking.  Something that stands out, catches the eye.

I would love to just press down on the button and release the colors.  What would I write?  Your name?  A script that maybe people could read?

I'd write it wherever I could...the sides of cars, on the sidewalk in front of work.  I might add a decorative heart, or an arrow...hell a smiley face.

I'd think about you coloring my world, my sameness...with your provocative name and your presence.  You provide the graffiti to my day, you write on my white overpasses, you write on my boring garage door.

You don't try to...you just do.

In my mind I would try to share with just a few people your name, and write it in big large letters.
So that I could see it for just awhile.

And have people linger and stare and wonder who that person was...this small bit of art.  This small bit of you.