Home-like

In the beginning it was quite simple...there was just air.  Nothing between them, nothing attached.  If it had been a home it would have been a grassy lot, maybe uneven dirt...perhaps maybe just a property line staked out with red and green tape attached to the wooden markers driven into the ground.

Not empty, but nowhere full.

No shelter.  No fireplace, no protection.  But there was imagination...there was a view.  There were the ways the storms approached from the East and broke and cascaded.  So there was that.

And with that first kiss the very first brick was laid...not quite a cornerstone but maybe the beginning of a walkway...the beginning of a porch.  Perfectly placed, a brick surrounded by the rest of the world but somewhat stark and almost lonely.

Soon other bricks were joined, the mortar this connection that was still not quite settled, but tenuously in place...raw.  A small portion of the walk that was just beginning.  But the view...with just a few simple bricks the shapes were imagined...the fence lines...the hedge lines...the skylights.  There was so much to imagine.

With each lunch or coffee, with each paragraph exchanged in words she was becoming known.  But she was just a guest...new...like a returning traveler to a familiar inn...coming and going but mostly hidden behind private doors.  Except with her there was such a desire to follow...to learn more.  To hear.  These tiny bricks she laid that promised something...something of grandeur.  You could almost feel it...almost recognize it.

When you were with her, just a small portion of it felt home-like.

Weekend Morning

He awoke before her, glancing at her huddled shape beneath the covers where she had pulled most of them around her, leaving him with a few bits of sheets and a little bit of blanket at his feet.

He smiled, knowing she was warm, probably still hungover and let her sleep.

It had rained overnight, the air heavy with humidity and drawing a pall across the sky.  The sky was white, the morning felt scrubbed and against the glass windows leftover rain drops slowly slid down. There was no traffic, no sirens...it was like the world was asleep.

He padded over to the coffee machine, one of those one cup at a time technologies and glanced briefly at the directions...figuring it out he did all the steps, and listened to the machine warming up the water.  Glancing back into her room he saw it was still dark, the curtains pulled tight...it was cold with the air conditioner on but he liked it like that...slept better.  Against her, his skin warm, she tended to slide against him, her legs entangling his, her arm across his chest, her nose near his pillow...he could feel her fall asleep, the tiny muscle reactions, the slowing down of her breathing...he thought she feel asleep first and once he knew that he could finally close his eyes and join her.

The coffee machine sputtered and started dispensing steaming coffee...the smoke of it rising and he looked for all the sugars and syrups he normally needed to enjoy it.  He found some in a box and added it until the coffee went from her eye color to a shade of her when her skin was the tannest at the height of summer.

He walked to the screened-in porch and opened the door, feeling the weight of the air finally...he pulled it closed quietly and sat and sipped...his mind was finally uncluttered...her proximity was comfort, his distance from her now gone.

Distance is a pragmatic matter...it's real, measured in miles and curves...with today's technology you could call or video...but still nothing was like the first kiss in rejoining...nothing like the weight of a hand placed...nothing close to scent.  Of all the senses it was just being near enough to breath her in.  She carried with her the day...her morning ritual, her day outside...her work, her play...she was recognizable and known...and when her narrow neck was near him all of her brushed off on him and he knew she was close.

She smelled like her.
She tasted like her.

A taste so instantly recognizable...unlike the coffee warm in his cup, with its syrups and sugars she possessed that naturally....every time.

He hoped she slept in...tried to remain still in the morning...her brain recharging and her body quiet.  There were slight stirrings in the air, leaves gently swaying, a barely perceptible breeze floating by now and again.  But mostly it was still.  Like a church that was empty late in an evening.


He finished his cup and thought about making another.  He felt a little anxious, knowing she was mere feet away...he wanted her to be awake, to be there...talking....that slight southern morning drawl that would be heavy from sleep.  Deep long deserved sleep.

He wanted to wake her with a kiss, right near her ear...feel her coming awake like he felt her falling asleep...he wanted her to join his day, be like a sunrise and just color his world, warm him, press against him and quicken his thoughts.

Instead he stayed quiet...knowing that he could be a little patient.  Knowing he could wait...that each minute for her was restorative...but still.  He could not wait for her to rise and truly let his day begin.

Soil

She loved morning sunlight the best, when it arced overhead in a slow and steady bird-like flight across the yard.

Pinking her nose, her thighs as she waded in the soil of her garden, alongside the barn and across to the little house.  Where grass never did quite well but never stopped them from trying...mostly though it was in the ground where she planted the Dahlias, and hoped for the Rainbow version.

Up the street in the Southern States feedstore she had plunged her hand into the seed bins, like bits of unmade candy in hopes of finding stark and contrasting colors.  She tied the seeds into tiny plastic bags with white foil ties and put them in the truck.  She loved the season of planting...re-starting...new and unmet colors.  Digging in the warming soil she barely had to use a trowel, but she had her hair pulled as tiny rivulets of sweat slid on her forehead, past her cheek.  She untied each of the bags and placed them delicately into the holes, patting them with covering and moving to the next batch.

A water pail was nearby, the water filled to the rim and it shimmied in the slight breeze.

She stood up to take a break and walked into the house, just as the air-conditioning clicked on with an audible snap and the screen door was shut.  It was well lit inside, and the refrigerator was ticking away and she snapped it open and pulled out a Corona.  She tugged the cap off with the iron opener on the counter and slugged down about half of it.  She looked at her hands, the dirt staining the sides of the beer bottle and her fingernails.  She looked at the yellow beer and hoped that perhaps some of the colors of the flowers would be that golden.

She went back outside, the screen door putting a punctuation on her departing.

The sun was full noon, barely a shadow beside her.  The beer was still on her lips, the droplets of sweat were still on her forehead.  The ground in front of her was mottled grass, a bit of white-washed brown in the old soil and fresh circles of newly ground soil the color of coffee.  It was a preview.

She imagined the future explosions of color, the contrast to the earth.

It was what she saw every morning over her dark eyes in the mirror, putting bits of pink on her lips, slight blues or silvers on her eyelids...

She was a sweet garden of colors and had no seasons but rather could bloom every day.  In winters and falls...she needed no rain nor water pail.

But even more so, she was the dark rich soil...where he could be buried, where he could be covered and with her perfect, certain care he would emerge.

Maybe not beautiful, but certainly better than he imagined.

Discernment

What do I see in you?

Rather, what do I discern?

The way you enter a room?  An elegant slide?  The slight adjustment from a dream-state to a reality?

Sometimes you are taller than expected, other times smaller.  I have to adjust my angle.

Your height...perfect when laying down...fitting...but perfect in an embrace of a hello...a fit...a comfort.

I recognize presence even before it happens...anticipation.  I feel the weight of you...I gauge you...an air pressure valve...I plug in and the needle moves.

I savor the morning you...the fresh and the clean...the unblemished...welcoming...

I delight in the evening you...some stress...some hair askew...natural.

The day of you.

Hours.

Minutes.

Give me what you can...extend into me an offer...an opportunity.

Because what I can detect is a return.

A home.

A land.

A familiar.

Restorative.

I find in you the outline of a shape.

That fits into me.

Cookie-cutter clean.

Perfect...in that chaotic way.

But mostly...a space that you fill that reminds me, time and again, of what I just need...in that moment.

That brief and fleeting moment when I first get to see you...and you enter a room.

Distance

Split the day in two, split the day in half...

Take a portion of it and divide the minutes...feel the seconds...like a heartbeat...a metronome.

Break the day apart like scattered clouds, follow their slow slack waltz across the sky...watch the tide slowly rise across the darkened sand...slowness, such unbelievable slowness.

Chant at the sun to hurry...hurry in its arc.  It never seems to move quickly until poised just barely over the horizon, then it is gone tumbling over the edge.

Plead with the day.  Bargain with the afternoon...the only lingering may be to watch the colors of the evening briefly at sunset so that I may enjoy a hint of beauty...a small portion comparably to what I am missing.

Throw my watch in the street, its slow reminder of minutes passing, and watch a passing car break apart the crystal, abandon the minute hand and never again weigh down my wrist with its boredom.

Shuffle through the day, pass through like pollen, float aimlessly and unhurriedly...so damn unhurriedly.

Hurry the hours until I get to finally rest my eyes and give myself the best chance of seeing you in my sleep.

Human

She was devastatingly human...in fact she was the only one in his universe.

Daily parades of others would go by, slip by, slide by...bevies of beauties and their struts and their mascara eyes...

But she was infinitely human...to him, a reminder.  The flesh and bone and the visceral piece of her that existed.  She was rare.  To the point of almost forgetting how she was, how she felt against him, a reminder torn from a part of his brain shuttering memories...she arrived stark and revealing.  Each occasion marked from the one prior...similar but better.  Familiar but intimately stranger.

Like the slight surprise you feel when giving blood...watching literally your very life spill out into a cylinder tube.  Mesmerizing that something could be taken from you, put into a vessel...and maybe even given to someone else.

She was that life-blood...when she appeared she had been plucked from her life and inserted into his. Even if only temporarily.

He consumed her, felt her presence...but then she would disappear.  Not by any other circumstance but the one they possessed.

She had sent a picture...of her in a tub...a revealing picture of a window...a candle... a moon...and her knee.  Barely any skin against a backdrop of marble and the outside world.  But his eye was drawn not to the flickering wick against a red wax or the smudged-circle of the white of a blurry moon.

Rather he saw her knee, it's skin slick from warmed tub waters, rising against the surface of the wet...like some small volcanic island against a blurry foam ocean...the color of flesh, a human color, immediately recognizable.  He knew it was her, would know it in a thousand views from his memory, but this one felt more sensual.

Her solitude against the evening, her lone self in recline...showing just the piece of her that led to the rest of her.  He had held that knee before...in stockings coal-black and in just bare skin.  It was neutral ground...go lower and you find her smooth calves...go a little higher and you find the heat of her thighs.

The life-blood pulsated in his ears as he thought about finding her submerged in waters warm and cloudy, skin reflecting candle dance light and shades of whiteness from moons...just the ability to close the distance and graze her skin...her knee...and see her beneath the translucent waters to reveal the fullness of her...her unique and utterly human form...alone...for him to merely join and find the familiar and the intimacy of a stranger.

She was human.  Devastatingly so.

Therapy

There was a road alongside the farm that in the summer was a tawny dusty strip alongside the greens of the fields...but in the winter or when it rained it darkened until it almost matched the brown shades of her eyes...and he always tried to drive by it every time it rained.

He visited her once after his first deployment.  Before he headed back to his second tour.  The one where he got hurt.  Badly.

But this was the summer before, and he was with her, her brother's truck stopped alongside the fence of her father's farm.  She was sitting in the bed of the truck, the gate down, her bare feet hanging over the side.  He was standing, balancing a few rocks on the floor of the bed.

What are you doing?  Her voice was only slightly above the few cicadas that chirped in the trees...they hadn't been talking...rather it was like a transfusion...her mind caressing his...soothing his.  He just kept trying to hear her breathing, and time his to hers.  It was calming.

Balancing.  Trying to get these rocks to balance.

Why?

Because this is peaceful to me.

He could smell the shampoo from her hair...the ends still dark and wet.  He had interrupted her with his arrival and she quickly put on clothes to come see him, waiting on the porch.  She had keys in her hand and they gathered into her brother's Ford 150 and driven a bit down the driveway and turned out onto the adjoining road.  She had an FM station out of Virginia Beach playing songs he remembered but hadn't heard in awhile.

The rocks keep tumbling each time he got more than four and he looked around the road for flatter ones to balance easier.  He saw her regarding him, her head tilted in that familiar manner...like she was amused.

What?

Nothing. She smirked a tiny bit.

He found a couple of flatter rocks and he got up to six total, larger to small, the top one about the size of a marble.

Well there you go. 

He looked up again and she was smiling.  Yeah, he said, I was just hoping it would take me just a little longer.

Why?

Because I like this.  He lowered his gaze to the rocks.  I love this.

A few summers ago they had both used that word.  They had used it in the quiet and they had used it between a kiss.  But when he told her he was going to be deployed it snapped something between them...perhaps irrevocably.  

So now, in the sounds of an afternoon, balancing rocks in the bed of her brother's truck he still felt that word in his head.  He just didn't allow it to come out as much.

Me too.  She said softly.

Beside her in the sun he placed his hand slightly under her foot, holding it softly.  He had cleansed her before...soaping and softly washing her.  Again that was before.  Now she was clothed except for her feet.  So that's where she was naked and that is where he felt he could touch her.

I feel he started...that this is what you do for me...you bring me this balance...this shape.  You keep me still.  Just being beside you.  

He continued when I was far away...from here...from you...it was hard.  It was pretty much its own planet...its own place....fucking Mars...

...each day I knew you were somewhere...knew you were out there...but I was unbalanced.  I was adrift, despite having the platoon and the pilots and the noises that kept me moving and working...but so unbalanced.

He took off the top marble-sized stone...and then put it back.

Just even now, being near you...is some form of therapy...some bit of removal of things that were weighing me...he laughed quickly...sorry if I sound like I'm a bit of a flake and not some combat soldier.

The cicadas were white noise again...and another truck drove by, stirring up the silt and the dust-motes...they both turned away from it and soon the vehicle went past.

She was quiet.  Until...

This is therapy for me too.

He heard one of her favorite songs come on the radio and he went around and opened the door, turning the volume knob so she could hear it better.

His rocks remained balanced, throwing a tiny shadow against the bed of the truck as the sun tilted behind them.

He remained as well.