The Sway

He loved watching her walk.

Quite often he was more punctual than her...and she was often quite late...but that was okay because he could find a vantage point, a view...a perch to allow himself one of the great gaits he had ever seen.

Her walking towards him was like a sunrise...a golden moment that was filled with possibilities and warmth...a stolen, delicate and fleeting time that took her from her distance to him.  It was a movie, with those old black and white still photos that you flipped in your hand and the character moved in stop-motion...Her walk to him was the first sounds of a favorite song...one memorized for years...permanent imprint...you moved your mouth to the words unconsciously...like the way his mouth moved anticipating her song on his lips.

Her hips swayed like a girl in a Tom Petty song...she clearly had movement...like a fingerprint to him that was so unique to her...he could see it in his sleep if lucky enough...one time at an airport a sign had kept him from any angle above her shoulders and he knew it was her walking towards him.  It was that ingrained...primeval...pure and maybe even reincarnate. 

It was subtle...slight...just enough movement to be noticeable to someone paying enough attention...it was catwalk sure and comfortable in her own skin...whether in heels or flats...tall or taller...and he loved it mostly when she arrived and the first thing she did was remove her shoes. 

It wasn't the last thing removed, but the shoes tended to be the very first.

Her walk towards was foreplay...her walk away was depression. 

He hated watching her go, for a billion reasons...but if nothing else he did get to watch her walk...even if going away for him for a bit.

It just meant she would be walking towards him next time.

Lazy Sunday

Later in that day they were slicing through the green waters in a kayak, and with only one paddle he was doing most of the work but the tide was coming in so it was an easy plow...the salt air was warm and there was a gathering of darkening clouds looming but no thunder yet...an evening storm would be the perfect coda to the day.

Earlier than that they were at the beach bar, a kitschy open-air place with hardly any variety but they had margaritas in plastic white cups, the rims lined with heavy salt.  She had tried the ceviche and loved it....he mostly ate the chips and what the natives passed around as salsa.  But the beach was nearly deserted and for a few moments it felt like it was their island...their views, the breezes and the scent of the bloom of the flowers in the trees surrounding the property.  After a couple of margaritas he knew he needed to either go kayaking or go back to bed.  She suggested the kayaking.

She let one of her hands trail in the water as they went, and he noticed her opal colored fingernail polish...it looked perfect on her...as did the red bottoms of her suit...it had moved slightly down and he saw the whiter part of her where the suit covered her normally...and the tan line was perfect...the contrast on her skin...she asked if he was looking at her ass and he had to confirm it.  She laughed and pulled up on the suit.

Even earlier she wasn't wearing a bathing suit at all.

In an evening that was a blur of words and bodies and music playing in the smaller room of the suite they had entangled and intertwined...burned the way a wick burns...the windows of the suite were open and outside there was no storm but there were winds and the scent of the evening ocean.

But that morning, upon waking, they were at different sides of the bed...in the slight movements of detecting her rousing he moved towards her...the sheets were still warm with sleep, her hair was tussled and beautiful and she still smelled slightly of perfume.  He found her arms opening and he got closer, feeling her beneath him, skin on skin...tanned and untanned parts.

Once upon each other they just laid there...even falling asleep for a little bit more.  Three hours later, after some room service in robes they were back again, just lounging in the luxury of a room with no clocks and nothing to do.

Until she suggested lunch and kayaking...and the return of clothes and others on a lazy Sunday.

The Smallest Things

Tiny, impossibly tiny billions of things...

The sun caught behind a tree like a fish in a net, the early morning still heavy in the air...

The crush of taillights on a black strip of pavement, everybody heading to other people mostly...but some possibly alone.

An elevator, empty. 

An airplane, scrapping white against the afternoon sky, the blue scribbled with fading trails of previous flights...

The first few turning leaves abandoning color to slowly crumple.

Many times it is a song...either shared or just a reminder.

Waiting in line for a sandwich...the primal need to eat...hunger.  Hunger is one that triggers many explosive thoughts...the same craving...taste-reminders...

A phone lifted to find a text...a few words in the ether that represent such a small portion of an exchange...

A mirror...time spent fixing lips and hair.

Sounds...sirens and horns...street lights...cities.

A window of an airplane, a tiny square with the world unfolding beneath...bringing me. 

A flower through a sidewalk...beauty in the incongruent...a bit of color against a pale canvass...

You...the billions of things that I see that remind me of you...

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.

The End of Summer

Rain...that was the first sign.

He sat in the car outside of where she worked...it was a bit of an invasion to occupy this space...to intrude her here...but he felt it was worth it since she had preoccupied a space in his mind for the last year...a sacred and secret place where only she could dwell...

Summer had melted away from them...a humidity that stifled.  It made them sluggish and distant...the slow slog of a summer calendar dissolved between them and a day became a week and then months...and in-betweens were like heat-lightning...brief and chaotic....brilliant but then done.

And then the damn rain...and its memories that filled him like a downpour onto an old house with poor gutter structure...leaking and spilling over and cascading in a deluge that is over-whelming...their first meeting in a storm and the protective cocoon of each other...first touches and glances and new skin and flesh...tastes.

No amount of rain could diminish that first full taste of her.

Her mouth in a storm.

But now, here towards the end of summer...it had been some time.  Passages. 

And he could remember everything about her if he tried....

Enough to fill a decade of summers...

But for now he'd just take an hour of her time if she relented...if she allowed...

Just to stand near...

Just to be near...

like the rivulets of rain streaming across his car window...never sticking...just sliding down in their gravity-pull...the way she slid across his memory...pooling at the bottom...

Signaling the end of summer like a sudden wake up to a cold and frost-bitten morning in Fall...the sudden removal of warmth...the fading of suntans...

Her absence was winter.

Linens

She was so beautiful against the shape of the bed...

She was so beautiful with her colors against the lightness of the linens.

Quiet sweet warmth of her arms...the way her body looked beneath the landscape of the sheets.

Her head upon pillows...the square of the sheet framing her like an art...moving...contrast...the indention of her upon the forgiveness of the pillow mirroring exactly like how she dented my heart.

Her walk to the linens was cat-like...slow, deliberate...stalking. Her outline a familiar frame, she rose above and upon me like a moon-rise...a comfort, familiar beauty.

The destruction of a carefully appointed bed, linens tucked neatly and stretched firmly across the landscape of the mattress, neatly pressed and corners perfect...with one hand she pulled back the sheets and exposed the place for me to fall...

To tumble...

together...

Paint our colors across the white linens...

perhaps the slight spill of wine...a claret color...or a darker version due to bourbon...or tiny sand-like pellets of salt from tequila...

the linens were a beachfront...
a poolside...
a cabana...
a snowfall...

against a pale palette we painted our summer and our fall...our bodies as brush strokes...

And when she departed I was left with the linens...askew...disrupted...smelling of her and her presence...her lotions and scents...and I would fall back upon them and pull them into me like I was clutching her even when I wasn't.

Distance & Other Difficulties

I can hear you smile over the phone...I can detect in your sigh the type of day you are having.

But absence from you is a lunar landscape...barren and devoid of anything worth loitering over...worth hovering over...

A wasteland.

And I worry that the voices that were once strong and animated, filled with words and stories punctuated by laughs and pitch are now barely echoes...and even at times just silence...

until I hear something pronounced the way you might say a certain word...and for a moment I am captivated...a long lost signal.

It's like the way a concert hall feels when the last piano note lingers in the air just mere seconds before the applause...the sound is like oxygen, to breathe in...to fall and push hair aside...that last word you said before hanging up....

I look up at the moon at night and I wonder if it looks the same for you...or if it is hidden, obscured by clouds or trees...I look at it early in the morning, as it gets orange and I find it more beautiful than at night and it reminded me that you are like that to me...your beauty starts my day and I seek to find it on the horizon and if lucky enough to see just a glimpse the change in my day is meaningful...the mood is like a brightening horizon...

Moonless nights look back at me like I feel...just absence.

Gut punch.

Starved.

No air.

Like life on the moon.