“I feel like a part of my soul has loved you since the beginning of everything.Maybe we’re from the same star.”
Magic enough to turn this city to an ocean, or the emeralds rising like flowers at our feet to mountain peaks, lives in my blood like iron and I still feel like a wisp of air in the places where I meet the roots of him. I wish I was made of just this, this feeling of softness and lightness fluttering where my hard heart has built a foundation of steel and ice. For him I wish I was a million other things, lighter things, things that would not feel like barbs twined between the petals of our love.
Somewhere the soft sand bottom of the sea starts to turn to black stone and ore. Somewhere the sea has a little less salt and land to claim.
I lay my lips against him with a smile hiding away teeth that have had blood caught in the cracks like seed and have learned the hardness of bone, flesh, and brine made weapon. “We need to stop meeting like this.” I say in that eternal place between his mind and mine. And I wonder how we ever 'meet' at all now, with all our edges tangled as weeds at the lake shore. I wonder how my bones have the strength to move in any direction in which he is not ahead or already there for the first step.
Our shoulders brush, his chin falls across my spine like the only thing I ever want to carry, and I let myself slip away to that place where the sea cannot reach the shore, and the soil is nothing more than rose spores floating around us like fireflies and comets. I slip away, I drown, I fall into the music--
I fall.
Into him.
It's always been him.
The emeralds and opals beneath us turn to snow deep enough to creak and moan against our knees, because there is nothing for me now. I am poetry again and bison herds in the dead of winter with seeds of snowflakes pooling in the crease of my spine like broken down threads of satin. I am sailing on our sea and this time there is not two ships but one with a single blood-red flag as ruby bright as the hearts stuttering in our chests trying to find a way outside. Even the fire-light cannot each us here, or take away a single ice perfect bit of snow from the dunes of it making it so that there is the rest of the world and there is us.
I try not to measure the angle of his spine and how it bows more than it did before, and I try not to paint constellation lines between his scares. I try to keep my eyes closed so tight that I only see lighting sparks racing across the darkness in echoes of his form, his smile, his everything. And in that blackness I press my lips into his neck, and breathe in the smell of cedar, and sand, and home. I inhale, I exhale, I fall deeper, and deeper, and deeper.
If I could I would make him into the bottom of the sea, of me, of everything that I know will devour me one day. “I could live a million lives, save a million more, and I would never find another moment as perfect as this.” Of course I'm not talking about the press of his flesh to mine, or the way I've become poetry on the pages of him, or of the cedar smoke rising around us instead of war-cries and suffering.
Of course I'm talking of the first time we met, of the song my heart was singing, of the frost painting reflections of the way we looked at each other and hung them from our eyelashes. And of course he must know, all the ways my soul, this form, has been made for him when I fill his mind with the shape of his form, and how he looked not like a man but like a prayer when he found me in the belly deep snow.
I think of no thoughts but that, of him, of the memory that is bright enough to color blood into shades of pearl white.
And if I opened my eyes, if I had the courage, I might have noticed every drop of moisture in the air turning into snow.
@
