Editor's Note

Dear reader, I did not suddenly  sit down and pound out a bunch of new pieces.

Rather, I just tied off some drafts that I felt I could release...I quite often try to force myself to contribute something frequently...but in the middle of it I sometimes lose my mojo.   It's not an excuse...I just feel it's not quite ready.

Most of the time I do it all in one sitting, and just let the flow take the words and craft whatever I'm thinking...to me it is like jazz....freedom and one-time notes that cannot be captured or put back for editing.

It's probably the single biggest reason why I will never make it as a writer...I hate to change the things that I initially create and do not want them to be altered.

Align

She was laying alongside him, her head just along his breastbone, and her hair was spilling upon him.  He was holding bits and pieces of it in his hands, splayed between his fingers, moving from the top of her head down to her shoulders.  He could see the white scalp, the shades of hair color starting and then moving in colors away from the part-line.

Every now and then he would open his palm and slide it down the length of her hair, like he was smoothing out the ends. Sometimes he just rested his hand slightly behind her ear, and let his fingers trace the hairline from their until it disappeared into the tapering behind her neck.

His chest moved slightly, because she was extremely light against him, and she molded onto him like she was pressed from an iron, warming, clinging, but slowly and gradually.  Melting.  Butter into the crevices of hot corn on the cob.  Rivulets of waffle-mix spilling and bubbling into the streets of the griddle.  When she was against him, in these quiet and effortless moments, he often felt like they shared each other...like a part of him was strung into her, and he needed to feel her breathe for him to breathe...that he needed to watch her pulse beat sweetly in her neck for him to metronome his own heart.

She breathed in, he breathed out.

What are you doing up there?  She murmured against the tee shirt of his chest, and she said it like she had suddenly awakened.  He had never been the first voice she had spoken to in a morning, but he had always known how it might sound.  Or at least he had hoped.

I'm admiring your scalp.

She tilted her head upwards, and he saw down her forehead, the angle of her nose, the rise of the cheekbones seen from above.


I'm pretty sure it's like all the others you've seen.

You'd be wrong.

Why?  Have I got something in my hair?

No...no.  You've got beautiful hair.  Nothing to worry about.  All good from up here.

She moved her head so it went back down, he couldn't tell if she was looking at something or had her eyes closed.


I was just finding a part of you that I had never really noticed he offered up.

You're taller than me...you get lots of time to study my hairline.

One would think...but it's where the scent of shampoo lingers the most, where the conditioners moisten and...condition, I suppose.

They're doing their job...this feels like an inspection.

He stopped.  Hardly.  I'd call it admiring.  I always love the different parts of you that make up the whole...but I will stop for now.

Thank you.

He didn't tell her that he did it to remind him that she was real, that she was there...that she had skin that could be cut, that she could bleed, that she wasn't just this part of his imagination but rather delicate and glaringly real.

A Storm to Wake to

It was well after midnight, well past the point that they had ascended upstairs, and intertwined themselves on the double bed.  They slept back to back, an indicator of the mood, as some reluctance had gently undone some things...he imagined ribbons of two different colors that had been tightly tied.  Now they were dangling, just barely touching each other.

Her house in Wakefield faced north, so that the slow arc of the sun traced itself from right to left across her yard.  The prevailing winds usually came in the opposite direction, westward...so it was usually a surprise to be immersed in a storm...you couldn't watch it come in like a distant ship that starts like that dot on the horizon.

So as he had listened to her breathing become a rhythm, his awareness of her nearby and being asleep, he was almost there when the slight rumble came from outside.  Hesitant to jostle the bed he slowly turned and soon he was flat on his back, watching the ceiling, waiting for the storm to arrive.

It wasn't too long.

He counted the beats between the flashes and the thunder and could tell it was moving quickly towards them.  She was still asleep as he glanced over and saw her shoulders rising slightly with her sleep breathing.  He wanted to say something, wanted to gently wake her...but in this peace before the evening exploded he stayed quiet...wanting her to keep these moments to her...not him.

The room suddenly lit up like a thousand floodlights flashed once and then immediately turned off, while in that blinding blink a bomb went off in the boom of a thunder cracking the evening in two.  He felt her body jump slightly and she let out a small almost child-like noise.  It had scared her.

He flipped to his right and put his arm around her.

She didn't resist.

For the next 20 minutes he held her, and when the blinking whites from the weather finally stopped she was back asleep against him.

Finally he reluctantly went to sleep...trying to dream exactly what he was doing with her right then and there.

Another Day...just like Any Other One

There were small signs, indicators...but he tried to turn them, reverse them.

She mentioned in comments, little lines about little lines...laugh lines, little parts of her she was worried about...a change that was enveloping her.

He reminded her to go out at night and watch a star...find a planet...look at a shiny, gorgeous sight and realize it was thousands of years old.

She always countered "if I was that far away I'd be beautiful too."

And he always said "the closer you are the finer you are."  And he meant it.

But it was hard to convince her.

But he also knew he would never stop trying.

Nuthin'

What are you thinking about?

....


...


Nothing.


That's not true at all of course...I'm watching the clouds pull from themselves like cotton candy tugged by invisible fingers as the storm breaks apart and small patches of blue emerge.

I'm listening to the helicopter slowly lower itself to the roof of the nearby hospital, then I'm wondering if the person inside is going to live.  I then wonder how many people are dying in the hospital even now, completely invisible to me...their lives just fading hundreds of feet away from me.

It is not depressing...it is life...it's not nothing.  It's not nothing at all.

I'm discovering new music, new genres...newer lighter combinations with no vocals, soothing and stimulating at the same time...perfect for studying...perfect for reading...perfect for crafting a bit of the pieces of papier mache that form a paragraph for you.  A form, a construct.

I'm dispensing time in an afternoon, drips like those spilled by a dropper...water dripping from the spigot in a tub.  Eaves still dripping from an afternoon storm.

The spread of you across my mind...layered, thinly but cleanly across the ridges in my mind.

Maybe at times spiking, maybe at other times ebbing.

But never...

Never....

Nothing.

Ten Summers

Ten summers ago...maybe nine.  She had shared a picture.

Cloudless skies and sweet breezes, harbinger of a gorgeous evening...but not yet...

The grass freshly mowed, perfect striped lines in parallel, the smell of wild onions and cuttings mingled, like bits of confetti that alighted in the air.

A company picnic, with white sticker name tags....it was weird seeing her full name, mostly because I referred to her first one so often...

She was laughing in the photo, that great wide smile...

And around her waist she held a hula hoop, still in her hands...she hadn't launched it around her yet.

Her shorts were dark, her shirt white...the colors standing out were the green of the grass and the hoop in her hands.

The camera captured her just before she started swinging her hips.

I had seen their rhythm before...had felt them against me...her wearing a bit of a different smile but one nonetheless.

She had shared a picture, from a summer a long bit ago.

But everything stayed exactly the same.

Location

Where are you?

Posed as a question but more likely a statement.

Can't do the math in my head...can't do the GPS thing, the latitude or longitude.

Rather the simple response is you're in my head, on that shelf you occupy.  That space....that location, the room with the key that you have to jiggle in a certain way to get the lock to open.  The familiar...the frame.  You need not move, you need not change.

Outside of that, there is a world in flux.  A world that is sometimes chaotic...changing...issues and drama. Dealing with the razor cuts of just a world that is so embarrassingly different that I cannot describe the issues...

of...

the...

Day.

And then I fumble around for the key.  To unlock the door that opens the room.  To a shelf where I have put you.

Trust me there is no dust on this door.  It is frequented often...maybe too much.  Maybe increasingly due to those outside bits of weather that force me indoors.

Like rain on a parade...not like rain on a wedding day.

I hear that's good luck.  And right now that's in short supply.

So, I return...I sometimes talk out loud to you, other times I'm quite sure I ask you to guess.

The thought...the clear comfort in knowing that you are resident within my mind is quite often enough...that there is a you...that truly exists and that is outside the lines.  That there is a you that happens to be as exquisite as the very first time....that there is even a possibility of you for the very next time...

that our binding cords are visible, tangible, tactile and touchable.  There is no guessing what happens when we are within arms-reach.  There is no mystery of how this ends.

Rather it is the math equation of when that happens again...when the lines intersect.  When the conjoined makes its way from the past into the present.

I never need to guess your location.  It is rightfully and always where I can find it.

It's just the detail of when you jump off the shelf in my mind and can become a slight weight in my arms that makes it difficult.