I wish I could sketch but my hands are mere dullards when put to test. Her visage begs for capture, not in facsimile or rendered pixel, but in seasoned illustration, fine dripping watercolour and thick oils sensually applied. I want to tear charcoal from the earth’s ash and smear it over canvas busts built in her image. Ten thousand hours per honed craft could never account for the sheer art of her existence. I want to dedicate myself to learning expression, pure, masterful, and crafted, focused on the labour of acknowledging that her crystalline beauty is irreplicable and unique.
We’re different ends of a watch spring. Where she coils tighter with actions and purpose, I grow slack to yield tension. I tick away and she tocks towards, holding taut equilibrium in the void. Calculated to equalise flaws, wound precisely together, we are honed to count on each other. It’s a wonderful way to spend time and oddly efficient, flying fast in the way of these things. No matter how much has passed it always feels fuller, flowing with the potential of a bottomless hourglass. We go on this way forever, forging past and future while enjoying our present.
I fell for her first in a darkened driveway, drunk on hard cider and the prospects of life. We chatted briskly in broad stroke motifs with incidental familiarity. For five minutes we’d known each other for years, shared space with an ease that tends only to come after erosion is done with defence. When she left I fell hardest, like watching sunlight pass across prison bars, I felt burgled and bereft. I stood in that darkened drive with the shape of love depressed in my hand and the knowledge that nothing felt so right as her by my side.
We festoon ourselves with curios cut from catalogues and call it chic — shorthand for happiness. Urbane couches in faux country fabrics. Modern apparatus for minimalist meals. Serving sets for absentee guests. Overblown glassware and unhandled mugs. Gewgaws that seesaw on surrealist values — some even with sentiment — where sat amongst these trappings we fete our taste. Haven’t we made something for ourselves, we say, believing an idiosyncratic arrangement of items is unique amongst others. We bury ourselves as pharaohs surrounded by worldly goods and social ills in a kingdom of kitsch and clutter, ourselves becoming as dust on the shelf.
When the nightmares wake me I turn to Arris and place my hand on her chest, falling into the space between breaths. Sleeping still, she lays her hand over mine and mewls softly at the dark, unconscious signals that need no dream reader to untangle. No light and no life show beyond the bounds of our room. We are all that there is. I move closer for my skin to know hers. Chest to toe my body warms with an inner glow. I turn to face sleep again, knowing whatever waits beyond, I will be safe when I return.
‘Tenderly but with a firm sense of ownership,’ she says, when I lay my hands upon her. I play my fingers down her spine and beneath the panty line, there I trade my tenderness, pound for pound per square inch upon her buttocks. ‘My body is yours,’ she says, but it’s my skin on fire, my lips melting upon contact, my senses subsumed, my heart quickening her veins. I place my tongue upon her neck and eat her pulse, soft chewing toffee relished for its texture. You are everything to me, I say, and her body says, I know.
Just in case, she keeps a catalogue of smiles at the corners of her mouth. I break the seal with my lunacy and unleash them regularly. She says, ‘I love you,’ through her laughter and it takes the corrugated cadence of a car on cattle bars. So I fling myself again and again at the furthest reaches of mania, wondering how much joy I can inject in her life. The answer is infinite, the industry of amusement set to pace with the manufacture of happiness. We have become a self-feeding machine, the product of the product of pleasure.
We are so porous now that our moods break the skin without even touching. Are you ok, I say, and she tells me not to say it, which I understand but do anyway, wanting to help. She sees me struggling like this and asks, is there anything I can do? I tell her not to worry and worry myself with her concerns. Of course, the happiness filters through too, the joy and love and revelries. This feels amazing, she says, and I don’t respond, she knows full well what happens when we’re near. We fill each other so completely.
Stuart lifts the metre lid and reveals a writhing pile of pupae. I watch them swarm and undulate while he takes the measure. ‘They don’t bite,’ or sting? ‘Natives are nice,’ he tells me. I wonder what it’s like to be a hive mind, would you even know you were dissatisfied unless the overbrain told you so? ‘The workers are all women,’ he says, finishing up, ‘and all the men are slaves.’ Stuart slides the lid in place amidst a cloud of buzzing curiosity. ‘I feel sorry for the queen though, all that control without the ability to abdicate.’
Sometimes I put on old ensembles and dance in front of her. Do I look miserable, I ask. ‘No,’ she says, ‘just a bit ridiculous.’ She’s right, of course, and means so well, these items no longer fit me, probably never did, and certainly don’t look as fetching as I ever believed. We go together now and I pick new things to pull over my skin. I hold them up in front of me and ask, do you like the way this makes me look? ‘Honey,’ she says, ‘I think you look best when you don’t cover yourself up.’
I often forget that people aren’t made up of my experiences and I wear myself out digging expository foundations for them. It’s not that I’m esoteric or eclectic, but the body of my life stands slightly aside the accepted practice of living. Even simple jokes land like a bricked window if they’re lucky enough to hit at all. What’s the difference between me and cancer, I might say, well, there’s a chance you’ll actually get cancer. Of course nobody laughs, not even me, and I wonder if they’re right, maybe sadness isn’t that funny, but how would I know?
I get more paint on my hands than the canvas and look upon myself with reckless appreciation. ‘I can’t make art,’ I tell the walls, but the inside voice tells me otherwise. What if, it says, what if you were the art? Imagine the entirety of space, the unlikelihood of earth, billions of compositions in fleshy permutation, vying and dying, striving and thriving, conniving against infinitesimal odds to exist in improbable events. Existence, then, must be art. I put down my paints and look at myself again through this new lens. Beauty lies in the I of the beholder.
‘You always write me laughing,’ she says, smiling. ‘I don’t think I laugh that much, do I?’ Maybe that’s how I like to think of you, I say, maybe that’s how I always think of you, full of the joy that you give me. Arris lays her hand over mine and kisses me swiftly on the cheek. ‘I’m sad sometimes too,’ she says, ‘or angry, preoccupied, tired.’ Her face shifts through emotions like sunlight moves through leaves and breaks a frown with a laugh. ‘You’re going to write this down aren’t you?’ I tell her, this life writes itself.
Nearly dead with the effort of saying nothing, I tell her, you are one gram of exotic spice in a time of cartography when a dozen lives would have ended at sea fetching favour for a queen. You are the cutting need for chisels, the impulse to etch, and the pull to put pigment to canvas. You are the stars under glass in magnified incandescence. You are sonnets, scores, and combustion engines, literature, plays, the mother of invention. You are the explorer in every heart and the dream dwelling in every mind. You are all that and evermore besides.
A Few Short Words 