Lines

We go up to your room at the top floor of the small hotel -- the room is not large, not especially remarkable (though you have a tiny and snow-covered balcony outside your window). You've left a bottle of champagne, sitting in a snow-filled bucket on the small round tabletop out on the balcony -- did you know it would be 1:00am, that I would come up here with you? -- and I sit in a slightly-awkward armchair with my glass cold against my fingers; you sit on the bed (eventually stretching out on your back, head propped up against the pillows). There is a long time that passes, and we sit there, sipping fine fizzy liquid and talking too loud, too fast, about a thousand little nothings. Eventually, I take off my glasses, rub my eyelids. Take off my boots -- one, two -- and climb onto the bed beside you, head resting on your chest. (Your hand on my back, my shoulder, and I hear your watch whispering, insistent, in my ear.)

He asked me, when we were sitting there in the small cafe, colored lights twinkling in the windows, music playing in the background, my friend in from out of town -- just for the evening, just to see me, briefly -- beside me, and his sometime-lover beside him...he asked me if coming back here, to Geneva, felt, in some way, like coming home. I could have cried (because of course, the answer was yes, and of course, it is the only real sense of home I have ever had from any place). Later, when we were sitting in your room, drinking champagne and talking about everything and nothing in particular, we spoke about things, and the attachment to them, and how some people perhaps base their identities on things instead of anything less solid and more real, and it struck me that perhaps this is what my attachment to things, to stuff, really is -- that is a place where I can find my home, because I do not ever find it in places. (People, objects, a turn-of-phrase, but never something on a map that I can point to, a building or a city or a place.)

There is a strangeness and a familiarity, with you (only the second time we have been beside each other, present) and the mixture comes together to spell out Safety, for me. And maybe that is something I do not want to throw off-balance, or maybe it is something as simple as too little time, or some combination of the two, or something else entirely. Because crossing lines, that is the thing that I am best at, it is what I do most often. And so often I find it painful, frustrating, that there are any lines at all to start with -- a wish that everything could melt together into shades of grey, blurred -- but, sometimes, there is a feeling that it is better, somehow, to occasionally have someone with whom no lines get crossed at all (or very nearly, as surely we were crossing some, some small ones, anyway, in bed and curled around each other, warm). And your watch continued to whisper secrets in my ear (and I didn't understand a single one).