Soundlessly, she clamps her teeth upon my shoulder and spells out sentiments with her tongue. I don’t need to make them out, I can feel the messages radiating like reiki through every single cell in me. I can sense the convulsions taking hold between pelvis and plexus, solar and cerebral, insular and encompassing. Decades of unnecessary knots declot and redistribute as undiluted energy. I apply my fingertips with delicate pressure to points of chakra and surreptitiously pass my sensations through her skin. Light and ethereal, she moans gently into me and the flow of ouroboros chi becomes spectacularly complete.
Arris looks out over the waterfall and is still for a moment. ‘The sound will never be the same,’ she says, ‘every trickled note is a new iteration of combination and intonation but the effect over time is homogeneity.’ I suggest it’s one of natures menial magics and she shakes her curls against my neck. ‘It’s us playing the trick,’ she says, ‘it’s too beautiful for us to handle so we drown it out.’ I look out over the waterfall and listen to the world move through time. I tell her, I can hear every moment of our lives.
Two boys sitting by the river, sharing a stout tallie from a paper bag, the late afternoon sun snaking downstream in a thousand foamy particulates. Jonah takes a gulp and sighs from somewhere beyond his body. Colt lifts the bottle from his friend and says, ‘That bad, huh?’ A coxswain barks directives. ‘It’s that good,’ Jonah tells the river. ‘Until now I’ve felt like an understudy for my own life. I knew the lines, blocking, and backstage etiquette, but was always preparing someone else for their break.’ Colt finishes the beer and belches, ‘Man, you’ve always been a star.’
Remember when you kicked me in the head and told me it was my fault, I’d leaned into it, or when you took me by the throat and told me to apologise for upsetting you? I want to say it’s funny now, but it’s not. I wake with the fruits of your labours festering on my skin, caught in iced droplets of sweat that chill me in ways I can never say. I wish I had scars that could heal, something to show for the violence and pain, something I could use and not merely the memory of abuse.
Even her name lives in fluidity, shifting syllables and sibilance, assonance in consonance and vagrancies of vowel without so much as why. To speak her name is to conjure the merest moment into substance, an alchemical miracle that disintegrates immediately under scrutiny. Still, I try it upon my tongue at every turn and find that where once my words were leaded things, unpalatable even to my ears, they arrive now flecked with gold that is surely not my own. I speak her name and find myself transfigured, all sinister elements corroded and configured into something utterly precious and rare.
Arris lays above me, subsuming my eye line like burnt caramel spooled into the red sea. ‘if I stick out my tongue,’ she says, ‘I can taste the electricity between your atoms. It’s like irradiated snowflakes.’ As I shiver and shake, something deep beneath the lizard brain wakes, extending tendrils through neuron and nerve ending, subdermal first but rending tissue so quickly, burning through me, yearning to be free. I submit and let its rough light permeate my pores and core, a bodily blitzkrieg that finds me fuller, occupied rather than conquered, activating cellular citizenry now primed with purpose.
We fuck so hard the fittings crack and the knick knacks clatter from the mantle. Afterwards, we lay in sticky splendour and quiver in each other’s arms. I love love, you say. I too, my love, adore ardour. We lock fingers and describe each other in fine detail. You, I say, are the corona that makes sunlight special. And you, dear one, are the defiant moon in daylight. The tides shift when we kiss, something tectonic quakes, and the world is rearranged. The stars align and this time we make love. Did you feel that, we say. My love.
Over unsweetened coffee and sweetly unexpurgated company, she asks me, ‘If I could grant you any wish, what would it be?’ I wonder if I should tell her my heart’s tacit part in this pact. My desire’s been given to me already, in fact, I asked for her and payed my price in full the minute she materialised. My soul in whole laid at her feet like some chivalrous throwback aimed at spare her spirit from the muck of the world. I smirk and tell her, maybe I’d like to be invisible, but she already sees right through me.
I found myself looking at me and the voice in my head said, I love you. It took a minute to realise I wasn’t talking to you and another to assimilate the shock. I’ve never said it to myself. I never knew I could or that if I did I might mean it. I said it again just to check and wept. I love you. I sat and wondered. Did I come across this myself or did you give me the key? Which thread of fate was wandered and was it alone or did we walk a similar road?
At turns crying and laughing, sweetly embracing, sharing saccharine saline and saliva, relief and disbelief, utter joy and the exquisite agony of existence. At some point we stop being merely ourselves. We expand and dissolve, slipping between the atoms of the universe into something seraphic. She licks my tears and declares them ambrosia. I trace the inside of her soul and graze the contours of Gaia. We regress into evolution, animal and archaic, exponentially experiential, presently intense yet stretched from creation to cataclysm, living outside of chronology. We laugh with each other, cry, sigh, and realise who we are.
I feel her hand on my shoulder, incalculable aeons of stardust settling. You should be working, a whisper. ‘I was daydreaming about you,’ I say. Only the day? A solar echo. That seems restrictive. Her laughter spools out, universally intertwining light and sound, gravitational waves and electromagnetism. Every move she makes causes an affect. ‘I wish you were here,’ I say, finding myself laughing. It took so long to parse, with nothing but theory until I’d felt the physics. I reach through space to take our hand and her voice is mine, ‘Even when I’m not there—’ I’m here.
I tell her, I think I made you up. She agrees but differently and laughs a little at me. ‘Solipsistic isn’t it? What if I made you up?’ Honestly, I’d considered it and decided if that were the case then I have nothing left to be afraid of, she made me exactly the way she’d intended. You are perfect, I tell her. She smiles and it is beyond imagination. ‘I’m just a mirror, honey.’ I look into her eyes and see myself forever in them. Whether I’ve invented you or you me, I don’t care because now it’s real.
Explaining romance to Caleb is like teaching algebra to bricks, though you can at least build something with the bricks when you’re done, I don’t expect anything less than a mere scientific shrug. ‘It’s just biochemistry,’ he says. ‘I could plot it on a graph for you.’ You don’t have all the data, I say, testing a hypothesis. ‘And you’re not objective,’ he tells me, ‘so, to which bias do we skew?’ I want to shake him and scream, some things just can’t be measured. How about we call it spooky action at a distance with a sensual slant?
I took up my chisel and spent decades learning to sculpt. I watched masters and amateurs, stopped and started, erred and marvelled, sometimes channeling the divine and sometimes chipping it astray. Often, I would simply look at the flecks of my efforts strewn to the ground. Often, I would cry for these scrapped carvings, wondering if my work would ever be done, my mind’s eye always in defiance. One day I showed you my labours, not exactly satisfied but contented by my efforts. ‘I love what you are making,’ you said, ‘but I really love what it’s made from.’
A Few Short Words 