Egg Farm

When we met, the first time, and I blurted out that you were so not-tall (as if you might have spent every day moving through the world but somehow failing to notice the moment you took up in space) I didn't tell you -- or at least I do not think I did -- why I really actually like that (as far as it goes, I mean; it is an arbitrary thing and height does not influence my opinions about a person, aesthetically or in the more important, hidden ways, but still). But when we embrace, my head can rest there on your shoulder, or my lips press against your neck, warmly, and my face isn't just smashed somewhere into your chest, there is no feeling of needing stepladders to kiss you. And this is a pleasant thing, this (all of it). When I am in the kitchen -- making tea, or making breakfast (or whatever it is when it is after noon and you have not slept nearly enough and the hours in bed stretch out and distort and drip like slow dark honey to the floor, but when you look, the time has disappeared like some kind of insidious magic trick) -- you come up behind me to wrap your arms around my waist, your palms in conversation with my skin, and you are warm and pressed against me, and you can rest, only-just, into the pause between my thighs, not-here-not-there, and it is almost impossible, to split my brain in two -- slice mushrooms and press back against you, hard -- and if you were taller than you are, it wouldn't be this exactly-same of a moment, here, and I do not think to tell you this, and later my mind is sifting through the polished pebbles and pale sea glass fragments and uncovered treasures that you leave behind you in your wake, and I hold this particular thought in the palm of my mind, and I think how silly, that I didn't tell you then.

When you aren't here, I see things -- anything, all of it -- and I think of you; I want to show you everything I see. I want to collect it all in pretty little boxes, tied with shining ribbons and dusted with glitter, and hand it to you to unwrap and consume at your leisure, in the long quiet hours of late-night or too-early-morning, inside your dreams. I want to give you everything I touch; each thing is really you, against my fingertips (inside my head, beneath my skin, the liquid warmth flowing through my veins).

(And when you tell me, My hands are your hands, in that moment, it is a truth.)

I try to distill the hidden intangibles inside of me into words, to pour those words over your head, shining trails of them running down your body, coating your skin, pooling at your feet. But it is a kind of filter, already -- because words are boxes with sides and tops and bottoms, and infinity doesn't fit inside a box, not properly. So what I tell you...it doesn't really matter, in the end. It is never quite the exact right thing, never quite tastes the way it ought to. (And I know what I am giving you -- or not even what I am, but what I want to -- but...) And my hand against your cheek might possibly be more right, or more true, or more precise (or it might not at all); your fingers paging through the book of my universe, dripping with unanswered questions, dripping with unquestioned response, dripping with the force of pure momentum. Your mouth on mine writes a story without a proper narrative arc; everything is penultimate and the story goes on and on and on without ending or beginning.

When we were sitting there, beside each other, in the dark -- and my hands were in your hands, your fingers tracing patterns against my skin, our bodies warm with proximity. (And all the other moments, also -- when every breath is a kind of love letter, folded up and floated into the air, prayer wheels turning to the rhythm of heartbeats, ceaseless, feeding off their own momentum, off the inner-outer forces of...something...vast and formless.) But, when. We were sitting there, in the dark -- the light from the screen, glowing, carving shadows out across your face -- and your pulse beneath my fingertips, and your palms gentle against me, and I turned to look at you, at your face (lit-up and veiled, both, there, so close to mine) and your eyes widened and then eased into a smile, and that. That is the river, and the bridge that spans it, that spreads out to give a home to the echoes of my footsteps; that is the map and the pathway and the land itself beneath us. (You think, perhaps, that I don't see you, but I can close my eyes just as tightly as anybody, and that's when things start getting interesting.)

If you are a mirror, and I am a mirror, reflecting an endless hall of neverending doorways, keyholes, illuminated -- back and forth and back and back and back and back and (this is where the breath catches). If that is what it is. But there must be something deeper, also -- some light source that glows, hidden internal, and that is the thing we catch in our reflections; a glow, a spark, a metal key, glinting -- the click of locks falling open, falling away. Mirrors can never see into themselves, and so they must never know the things they hide within them -- endless reflections, a deep well of unseen memory, waiting. (And even in the dark, without any light to give them form or function; even then, they still exist.)