The Lesser Is The Greater

You mix these thoughts together and they become thick and sweet, something to lick from fingertips, from the backs of spoons. And you toss in more words, great handfuls of them -- every taste and shade and nuance, and through some kind of magic transform the whole into something so nourishing and real and the taste that lingers on my tongue, afterward, is like nothing at all describable. I could eat and eat and eat them, these things you bake for me, warm in my hands and electric on my tongue -- more and more, and never sated, always still hungry for another (and another, and still one more).

And this builds itself, one word at a time -- a trickle that becomes a river that becomes a huge world-sized wave, crashing down on everything -- or we build it, bit by bit (or it was there to start with, and with every word and every tick of the clock we are simply erasing more and more of whatever was obscuring it; pull away the veil, and it's been there all along, waiting -- the statue hiding within the cold chunk of stone).

A minute particle of nothing that expands and unfolds until it is filling up the whole of everything, and infinity widens to make room, and nothing stops or slows, and I cannot breathe and it doesn't matter but it begins to taste of panic and waiting three more days to see if fiction can be reality suddenly seems impossible. I need things human-sized, I need something I can hold in the palm of my hand and feel the edges of it, the smooth solid absoluteness; I need to remember the secret to inhale-exhale-heartbeat-quiet. And I ask you to meet me, sooner, now -- and No and Can't dissolve, change shape; there is a hidden alchemy at work, here, that turns things into Yes and Can (it coats everything, here, since the very first thing, turning something solid into something possible, turning possibility into something solid). And when you walk in, from the cold outside, and you are suddenly real and a thing that I can reach out and touch, beside me -- and your arms are wrapped around me, tight, and when I brush my lips against your closed mouth, briefly, I feel a string of bulbs light up, explode, in a neat line down to my feet.

So we sit there, leaning close together, your cold fingers wrapped in my warm ones, and your fingertips grazing my skin, ascertaining where things begin and end, and your eyes and your face and gravity is suddenly just a theory, quaint and wrong-headed, something to laugh about. Everything is tightly-focused close-up, and all the rest just falls away. (Later, walking in the cold wind-rippled night, I push you back against a wall, abrupt, and kissing you is like a huge intake of breath after too-long underwater. It makes me ache, to stop.)

There are things I want to say to you that I cannot; they wriggle just beneath the surface, making me itch. And I want to give you everything, to hand you infinity wrapped up in paper and tied with golden string; whisper secrets into your chest, show you the open doorway into mine. My empty palms, outstretched; I am spelling out proffer with every breath, every moment of my pulse. Waiting for you to take what is there, to take what isn't there, to take it all (waiting for my fingers to close around your own).