I have to say it while she’s calm so I might get heard. You make me feel disentitled to my opinion. She doesn’t look at me, ‘Is disentitled a word?’ I think so. ‘And that’s your opinion?’ That’s condescending. ‘No sweetie, that was patronising. This conversation is me condescending.’ You fucking strip me of my humanity and then blame me for being a zombie, like a proper voodoo puppet for you to play with. I feel like I’ve been shot and asked to pay for the medical expenses. ‘Oh, sweetie,’ she says, ‘we both know you couldn’t afford that.’
I keep dropping your brain on people that don’t even know you. Yeah, I say, you were telling me about that the other day, or showed me this article, or read it, said it, did it… All the things you know and do in my conversations; depth, breadth and dimensions, I only wish it were truly you and not just your thought. Actually, I was telling my friends only the other day about how you’d said that or something similar, I think. Funny, I can’t quite remember now, I’ll have to ask you next time I talk to someone.
I’m standing with strangers, near enough to one myself but not for the charms in my pocket and graces of fate, watching her play a piano in the street, beaten old upright been community curbed, loose a few boards, some keys, and an octave or three. She lays out a film score near to denouement, full of latter act arpeggiation here played as prelude. As the piece unfurls she pours herself into the sound until she is no longer conscious of how impressive she is, merely the pressure of the keys, the rhythm and its needs. My heart sings.
Sharing space together but me separating myself by insecurities, an evolutionary vestige still clinging to my chrysalis. You know, it’s not always going to be sonnets and sunshine, I say. There might be times where it’s gloom too, and grey. Arris smiles with her eyes and opens her mouth wide, unleashing a kaleidoscope of butterflies. They flock around the room, flutter, flap, and fill every available space, countless wings in the colour of all things beating their response upon the stillness in the air, a chaotic order of magnitude. So, I say, it doesn’t matter? And the butterflies abate.
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.
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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.
A Few Short Words 