I cried myself a river and floated bodily down it. Occasionally I would reach into the brackish wake, hoping to steer by manipulating the past. Of course, I hit every rock I could, lamented the rest, and yearned for the coast. Though I found the tumult quite comfortable, as my journey lengthened I wondered to what end I was headed. The more I thought about it the more the river receded. Eventually I found myself beached, standing upon a raft of experiences and wondering what next. I looked to the horizon, saw a mirage and decided it was real.
Love is rubbing your lover’s feet after the shitty day you’ve had. Love is saying fuck off and meaning it, knowing it means nothing. Love is pimples and concealer, ravishing boredom and humdrum thrills. Love is accepting the smells, ignoring the implications. Passive, aggressive, slovenly, exacting, love is human and fallible, gross and divine. A trust fall in a bottomless pit, love is the knowledge you may never be caught before the bottom is hit. Love is invisible, immutable, transient and staid. Love is acceptance and longing and that being said, let me just say, I love you, instead.
My teeth hurt. I can feel myself dying. I wonder if it’s scurvy but know it’s not, just general malnutrition and a lazy malaise. I should do less nothing and more something, probably, that’s generally been the problem preached to me. I can feel the constriction in my lungs, though, vile little nodules growing rot and bile, creeping up to close my throat, at the back where the nasal sewers deposit themselves. I feel chalky and brittle, a set of crumbling functions in a bad routine. I don’t believe this will last but don’t know how to change it.
Arris prowls the length of each meridian and peruses every nexus, her travels leaving a soft torrent of honey running in her wake. ‘And it’s all mine you say?’ I nod softly at the pillow, a mere depression and relent leaving barely a dent. ‘All mine,’ she says, and measures the ley with eager precision, deft fingertips plotting each pressure point and planting a tender flag. ‘I still can’t believe it,’ she says, though doesn’t pause her territorial assertions. I sigh and close my eyes. It’s yours, I say, now and forever. I never knew its worth before you.
She’s presently living in another time. Only a mere matter of hours but seperate still from mine. I look up at the constellations and think of dilation. The farther out you go the further you stray from now. Four hundred and ninety seconds from Sol to surface, an Apollonian joke. I laugh and wonder how long it would take the sound to reach her heart, but I can’t clock the variables and the thought falls apart. Staring at our mutual stars instead, counting to infinity in my head, I take comfort knowing that, relatively speaking, we are always wed.
Arris lays her head on my chest and sighs lightly, like tulip dew dropping on grass. ‘I can hear your heart,’ she says. I wonder out loud, is it too fast? ‘Steady,’ she says, ‘I’m surprised.’ I am too, living as I’ve been with the thump-pause-thump-thump-triple pause-triple thump-pause-thump pumping like a morse operator jumping at the lines. Yet, I feel unshakeably calm. ‘I feel so safe in your arms.’ I slip my hand to the nape beneath soft linen curls and massage ventricular messages into her mind, finally having found my calling.
Arris looks right into my eyes and I shiver so hard I think I might die. ‘Are you ok,’ she says. I tell her I think she hit a nerve. I can feel her pressed against my being, strumming across my sinews like some cosmic harpist. The sound of a solitary droplet striking the surface of a subterranean spring. I quiver, don’t die, and listen to it resonate. ‘I can hear you thinking,’ she says, a tuning fork tapped against bone. Inside my skull, I say, I don’t doubt it, and she smiles wide enough to swallow me whole.
A penny for your thoughts and a quoin for your wall, I’ll scream from the ramparts, I love it all. From curlicue to balustrade, balcony to bay, I relish the delicacy with which your facade is made. In basement, through casement, under transom and truss, a handful of setbacks will never break us. Beautiful buttresses and steep moulding spires, immaculate masonry and a hearth full of fires, and under the eaves an attic rife with desires, my one castellation now thrown to the pyre. A last little roundel placed on my heart, one final flourish that sets you apart.
I wake into her as the drowning man, gasping and lost. She strokes my hair as the seawater nightmare drains from my lungs and says, ‘Hush.’ Have I been sleeping? ‘Sort of,’ she says, ‘in a way we both have.’ My skin seems aerated, void of tension, and I worry her arms wont be enough to tether me. ‘Don’t worry,’ she says, as though my thoughts were a stream running over opal pebbles and passing from her lips, ‘we have each other now and that’s all there is.’ I worried I might never wake, I say, opening my eyes.
All that shifts in the night is silence and smoke. ‘I want to show you something,’ she says. Placing my hand in hers, she lays them on the counter, placid. The smoke coils, dancing between us. Countless molecules shimmer, cavort, and graze upon their fabric. The air warms, its crisp brace shredded in a still kinetic bath. She raises her hand and one hundred trillion atoms are suddenly meagre, they burst and multiply, flitter and merge, shouting joyously across an indefinable space. ‘Can you see it,’ she asks. I tell her, I can feel it. Suddenly everything is different.
I’ve seen stewing.rainfall.eats, dreaming.munch.magnetic and best.prosper.lash, yet nothing has felt so splendid as mutual.minds.dusty, a welcoming kiss and instant ease. Being led through librarian.labels.shelf and insert.they.coherent to life.toast.think where we listened to each other, made coffee to drink and learnt strong surface depths. Moving past scare.types.reveal we lay in exist.light.drums, linked.digits.fears quelled and simply felt. Quench.lakes.giving, watching us with patience, letting in little outside lights, lives.puzzle.lush, while elsewhere the oily river babbles, struck.give.rewarding.
Standing by the cliff, she says, ‘I want you to push me first and then dive in after to save me.’ I don’t ask why and she laughs and the harness tightens. ‘Are you scared?’ Only of losing you, I say. ‘Don’t worry,’ she says, ‘after this you’ll have only lost fear.’ I can almost see her skin eating the sunlight, caramel clashing and consuming the blue. She turns to face the cliff and the future and says, ‘Now fucking push me.’ I put my hands to the small of her back and whisper in her ear, I love…
A tiny brow crease and wrinkle of the little pock that lives above the left. There’s something in her eyes. They’re glistening, not with tears but a spectrum, a fast vastness that ripples and contorts and plays across the iris like a borealis flirting upon the tundra. This thing in her eyes, it doesn’t hurt but does carry fear; it doesn’t propel, but does carry hope; it doesn’t carry her, but does makes her float. The brows push together more, increasing indent. There’s something in her eyes. There’s a word for it, wholly inadequate but labelled, an unbearable lightness.
I wonder what I’m supposed to be some times. A sin eater? A catalyst? Collateral damage? Is it one of those perception things, a parallax error where life doesn’t line up for us because we see it from different angles and they’ll always be at odds? I wonder what that means I am some times. The glass? The water? The waiter? Is it one of those preconception things, a baked-in behaviour as over cooked as this analogy? I wonder what I should say some times. I am, I am not, I may be? Yes, no, maybe? I wonder?
I threw all of your things out like so much good trash. I went out and put it all in the garbage, stared at the recycling bin and shrugged, saying, ‘Sometimes there’s nothing to be done, buddy,’ before walking back inside. All I kept was one lousy photo, it’s not even of you, just some trees you can’t much see and a hazy sunset that means nothing to me. I put it in a box of forgettables, one day I might look at it and remember you, it happens, but it won’t feel like anything, not even a waste.
A Few Short Words 