The kissing bristles of the toothbrushes gets me, says more than I can when telling her. I love the unity formed by merging symmetries in odd arrangements. She’d call it tesselation and I’d say fate. We’re both correct in our ways and compliment each other. I find a thousand tiny reconstructions of my self in her patterns, as I’m sure she does in mine, each one slightly planar as a spiral wrapping our lives in expansion from the focal point. So, the kissing bristles get me in their bed, saying what I can’t before they pass across my teeth.
I stand outside, watching her move through the mesh screen guarding the kitchen. It’s not our home, we’re dwelling. Sparsely furnished, fully occupied, the owners lives present from board to mortar. Watching her wearing it, an adult playing dress up. One day, I say, I will build this for you. Brick by brick in deed and metaphor. ‘My love,’ she says, a smile’s softness severing all my muscles. ‘As is proper, we’ll build it together.’ Watching her form through the gauze, the house lights define her filigree. You are my heart, I say. ‘Then we already have a foundation.’
Her breath feels like a pollinated breeze, rustling sunflowers. It gives goosebumps and shivers, brings growth and joy. She seems too alive for her skin, more than an auras ostentation, a potential explosion calculated but barely demarcated. It’s almost unbalanced, tilt shift technicolour on a greyscale backdrop, she pops out and drowns the world. The whirlwind whipping round the eye, stillness in chaotic check. Her presence expands beyond bounds, the paint on the brush, the stroke on the canvas and the easel itself. She is pure life, elemental and unbridled. How the world copes with it is a mystery.
She carries herself in a layer of lightness like loom woven cotton wool armour. It fits her perfectly and is incredibly fetching, refracting the colour of magic in indescribable octarine shades of aura. By no means her best quality, for some, sadly, it’s the first and only they will ever see. Of course, I’ve had the luxury of peeking underneath, of unlacing her gauntlets and grieves, breastplate and chainmail carapace. Beneath this construction her true face is unobstructed, so much more than mythos, it’s the unglossed but lustrous blueprints for millions of magics, fantastic strengths, and supernaturally untethered ardour.
After the lights go out a second shade of black falls behind my eyes. It’s not absence of light but the addition of everything, a morass of thought that swells and blends and churns away in consumption. I find that I must open my eyes to let the world back in to abate this myopic misery. What is it about the mind that lends itself so well to intimate destruction. I so often wake in an eviscerated state and scramble to reconfigure self. With the lights restored the shadows scramble but they’ve left their mark, indelible like radiation burns.
I love the creases, those little folds where two bits of skin butt together and force a compromise, the coarse, cold lustre in the raw fact of a body and the ability of our meticulous machines to contain the capacity for flaw. Perfection seems almost imprecise to me now, lazy somehow. Let me see the curves and bumps and blemishes and errors, they are impeccably base, idiosyncratic, artistically erotic, and easily outstrip any attempt at replication or suppression. Undressing the body of ideals reveals a form where nothing gorgeous is the norm and beauty is selfless and sensuously free.
I wake up early and sit with my doubts in the pre-dawn purple hung over the sky. Traffic waves wash up and down the street, the reassuring rumble reminds me of my childhood beach, and down that tract, latterly the lake. Frozen in my memory, every grain is sharp, the edge foam crests perpetually, sky a vivid blue, hawks hung on currents, her hand on my shoulder, warm but for the cool, thin band of metal, silence taut between us, warn like a shawl. I sit a minute in the haze, visit elsewhere, ready myself for the day.
I find her reading palms by the light of a thousand paper candles. ‘Give me your past,’ she says, ‘and I will offer you a future.’ I take my place among the silk and linen trappings that furnish the floor. Her eyes absorb all that is about us yet hold no reflection nor judgement. I lay out my life in fitful spurts of recollection and scaled memory. She listens in patience and stillness while a warm autumn breeze licks at the canvas tenting. When I am done she smiles and says, ‘There now, you have years ahead for lightness.’
He leaves small pleasures upon my skin in incidental dental indent, artisanal marks in off kilter circles displaying the irregularity of his teeth and our love. I lean into the kinetics of it and trace the path it takes through my system, nervous at first, in turns excited, a small point of pain pierces me deeply, dances upon my spine and dives into my heart. I don’t say anything and watch him listen. ‘I know it,’ he says, and lays his lips as balm upon my every hurt. Intake of ephemera, output of certainty, my body responds to bonding.
Stood by the river with clasped hands and the high tide begging for our feet. I thought for the longest time that I could never live, I said. I’d come to accept that happiness was something other people felt. Arris pulled herself into the furrow beneath my arm and constricted my chest. ‘I thought I knew what happiness was,’ she said, ‘that I was living and had lived a life as happy as I might.’ I pulled her close about the shoulder and listened to the lapping water. We are always more together, I said, watching sadness float away.
It’s reverse mummification. She put my brain back in first, then my heart, and my lungs, then all of the essentials in sequential. Consequently, I began to think again, to love, and breathe, and fill myself once more with life. Slowly she unraveled the bandages that had bound my aggrievances and grievous insecurities. I was administered to with purpose, poise, and passion. I was looked upon and told, ‘These are not wounds, these are birthrights, birthmarks, and merits. They will be seen and gleam. Each one a story told in discreet cellular makeup.’ I was not exonerated but exhumed.
In one moment more than half a century of cumulative living condenses into a heartbeat. There is no separation despite the space. Two humans, yards of skin, miles of intestine, feet of clay, a neural net as wide as two lives cast upon the spirit of the times. No need to even touch, though touching it is. Parity and intensity, serendipity and certainty, fear and elation, cellular rejuvenation, something shed and something borne, two things, now one, then something more. A vast divining sigh that constellates the sky, a moment spanning the entire breadth of time. You then I.
Every night’s another death, that’s why sometimes I’m so reticent to sleep, having left lessons unlearnt and a days work unaccomplished. It’s like trying to build a building using the surrealist writing game, every incarnation absorbed and only the folded remnants to work with. I wonder about each soul that takes to the task, such variegated people sitting in a single skin and purpose put to rest only to be picked at like a mid-seam stitch. I wonder every day if the me I’ll be will accomplish what I wanted when his time comes, who will that be?
Sometimes her hands are mine, inhabiting my tendons to move my flesh with tenderness. I marvel as they manipulate my skin, gliding with such unbeknownst elegance. I never yet possessed such delicacy, such intimate efficacy. Her voice in my mind, such divine intervention, rendered in exquisitely fine detail, beckons and cajoles, rolls and ravishes my whole body. This bloody sack of hopes has sat, doped and somnolent, so long that corpuscles had withered to deprive my spirit of its life. Now, sometimes, her hands are mine, they sense things I could never find, and touch with blind, unexpurgated fervour.
I fell down and broke my skin then sat there staring at the wound. ‘What is it,’ Arris asked. I told her it was circumstance, clumsiness, a lack of care on my behalf. ‘Can we fix it?’ I watched the blood seeping and said, I doubt it. ‘This is the dumbest thing I’ve seen you do,’ she said. Not getting hurt but passively accepting it. ‘You are strong and resilient. I am smart, we can fix this.’ I lay my hand over the wound so she couldn’t see it, and smile, winsome. Some things just need time to heal.
A Few Short Words 