8 1/2 Pounds

You were on top of me, your face close to mine, when you said that you wanted to read what I would say about this, about you, about us. My legs wrapped around your waist (and you are more substantial than any concept; you are a tree hiding a secret treehouse, shelter from the sky) and you might as well have told me that you'd like it if I would breathe, that you'd like to taste the rise and fall of my chest, that it could tell you something. (And I would pour words into your outstretched hands, over your bare skin; I would simmer them in honey and cook them down to something rich and sweet and feed them to you by the spoonful. I would let you hear me, for a moment.)

But that is later. The beginning is made all of words, also -- different ones, small and green and fleeting. Words and then the clink of ice cubes in a glass and a kiss stolen, standing up. And all the words that followed that would not have happened -- or this is what I imagine, or suspect -- without the kiss to call them out. Words and words and more of them -- when I run out of them to give you, I offer up the words of others (and surely those are more satisfying, anyway -- more than my artificial-sweetener junk food plastic sentences that can fill you up and take up space without ever satisfying, without nourishing; things that sometimes seem good going down but leave you with the taste of false and empty, disappointment burning at the back of your throat, lingering). Can I apologize for the only thing I ever seem to have to give being so stark inadequate? (Though you, I think, do not believe in apologies as such, so perhaps I can't; there is no trade here, for me, in that sort of currency. Can my fingers, trailing, tell you everything you need to know -- or, more important still, can they tell you everything I want you knowing?)

Let's pretend that it is possible.

But before that, or beyond it -- I make you tea, and you unzip my dress. Where is the symmetry in that? (A warm ceramic mug for a warm expanse of skin.) But it is the in-betweens that give anything a name that follows (and the not-quite-anywhere is where I make my home). When we are stretched out in the sand, the small island of the bed an abbreviated stretch of beach, and my fingers follow the tides of your face; when we are laughing (and my talking unspools and tangles and never finds an end or a straight line or anything at all) and you are smiling and I am watching you smile, and feeling it here (with a certain illustrative gesture of my hand -- your hand -- palm up, fingers curled) deep down, then you are beautiful and I am somehow...there is a sanctity in moments, sometimes. Lying beside you, lips and fingers lazy, aimless, could be a hymn in church, the end notes all vibrato and sustained. (And maybe this, right here, is where I keep my virtue, and not in any box.)

When your mouth is on me, there are moments when I can halfway-see the patterns that your tongue is tracing -- actually see them, behind closed eyes, brightly-colored trails flashing intricacies and some secret language of Yes and Please and More -- when pleasure is suddenly not conceptual, but solid and a color and there is an impossible-to-reproduce specific shape to it. You are constructing the labyrinth, and I am lost inside of it, and happy to remain there, wandering, floating (and the maze is unspooling from inside of you, and it is inside of me, and we are both inside of it, also, and time and space are funny things, but these thoughts come later, after me).

And the effect you have on me, your body, your face; I want to devour you entirely, drink you until I'm over-full and falling-down and high. Your hands, and your fingers in my mouth, and the way your skin feels beneath fingertips; the muscles in your thighs and the scent of your chest. All of those things tumble into one another, gathering momentum. (When everything is moving faster than the fastest thing, and stopped still unmoving all at once.) When my lips are wrapped around you, and I am saturated with the taste of you, and time moves faster and slower and not at all, and every pause is to read the pulse of everything through slippery fingers, and to perch quietly inside my head and watch your face. (How would it be, if we could taste somebody's mind, their heart, when we were tasting their pleasure?)

Here is the important part (or perhaps they all are, infinitely splitting into pieces and re-forming and all of it paramount) -- to lie beside you, directionless, and laugh and pass words back and forth like an overflowing bottle (you pull them out of me, and I spill out with too much of everything) is easy, and uncomplicated, and (maybe, somehow, in a small and qualified sort of way) Right. There is a moment of calm, between inhale and exhale, that is the space on your chest where I rest my head; there is a moment of calm inside of which I can (briefly) rest.