The space between

I woke up from strange dreams last night, laying on my back. My eyes slid from imaginary sunspots on the ceiling to you, laying on your side, curled tight into me. My brain was a fog rolling in from the Sandman's world. I felt heavy; lethargic, direly confused at being thrown from imaginary avalanches and flooded motor homes directly into your bed, melatonin weighing on my eyelids. Looked down to my chest and saw my hand laying across it. Tried to move it, brain straining. I felt as if my hand had moved but there it lay. I shifted slightly, and there was my hand, behind the one I'd been trying to move. Behind yours. I must be really out of it, I thought. But then, sometimes I can hardly tell where one of us stops and the other one starts, anyway. Sometimes there are no lines between us. If you share your hands, your soft skin, your smile (sometimes purely joyful, sometimes embarrassed, or shy, or a million other feelings), if you share your messy hair, and your grumpiness in the morning, and the right side of your bed (yours is the left), if you share playstation Player 2, and eggs only fried in olive oil, and grapefruit juice that isn't pasteurized, and shoes with the backs broken down, if you share lost socks and share the only two socks we have between us, if you share diner breakfasts and rocks by the river that are perfect for laying on, and the crash of the ocean, and the slight awkwardness of hotel rooms, and the sighs that come from the first touch after having waited too long, and if you share netflix marathons and pints of beer and silly mobile phone games and people being creepy at the gym and a million hugs and kisses and a million mornings waking up to your face and a million cups of coffee, and if you would only share all of those things, I would share with you my heart. But we both already did those things.

The Last Star in My Sky

Lines. She doesn’t remember where they came from, but there they are, tracing her face like burros through the Grand Canyon, heavy-laden, each bearing a burden. The mirror has become no-one she knows, but that is why she opens the windows at night. She pads across the old oak floor to the window, on weathered feet shod with the slippers she received this Christmas from the Presbyterian church down the street. A chill breeze ghosts across her rice-paper hands and they start to shake. She grips the windowsill and leans out.

And then, suddenly, there it is above her: the last star in the sky, strung from the place where the universe ends. Dangling there. What was it, she asks it, that set the game in motion? Who tipped the first domino? Who put out the first star, succeeded in a rolling motion by myriad dots blinking out all across the sky? Who dipped the brush into the inky grey, LED lights straining somewhere behind a galactic screen where electrons careen through wires of infinite space? Was it God? Was it you?

She imagines a face. Tries, but the lines kept falling out of touch. Somewhere where atoms don’t stop fingers from moving any closer, anymore. The hair, it should be like this. Just this shade, and it should fall this way, and it was never quite right and that is why it was perfect. She can’t rightly imagine it now, because there are no more constellations to paint the pictures. No more plasma. No more stardust. No more ghosts.

She strains to remain in fellowship with the window, once a parking lot, once a garden, once a rolling plain, once elements whirling through a massive, explosive tide. She looks up at the last star that will ever hang in the sky, and with arms larger than worlds, she reaches up, and plucks it.

The Furry Ball

Once, I caught you masquerading at a party as a man. The lions walked by, shaking their manes. Tigers crossed your path, tails swishing. Then the dogs, the wolves and coyotes. The bears. The birds, one by one, and the creatures of the sea. You said, all your friends go to parties dressed up as animals. You said, how strange.

But on the dance floor, you were the one out of place.

One time, I caught you masquerading at a party as a man. The get-up was very good, I'll hand you that. With mask secured firmly in place, the seams were nearly imperceptible. Again, I will say: it was quite good, and yet you left a long string hanging from the end of your coattails. Just dangling there. And all I had to do was pinch it between my thumb and forefinger as you walked away.

As it turns out, we're not really so very different, you and I. We all hide an animal inside, somewhere.

The secret is, it's nothing to be ashamed of.

God's busy gardening

I could shake off that sinking in my chest. I could just shake off the black sunspots on my brain.

I could just close my eyes, and kiss you like you meant it.

I wish you meant it.