Your lips part, there is the sonance of your flowering throat, the click as your tongue touches the back of your teeth, "If we were luckier, or less, and war was everywhere in the world, and you were sent away, what would you do?"
You don't look at me when you say these things, your eyes sad and in the window, in the rain, in the city sidewalks. There is a vast sleeping mountain, like a jutting bone of the earth, and beyond it a silver desert that pours into itself, lost and endless before the lines of a town, then a city, then an emerald crescent shoreline, all between you and me, and this lane of blankets over which we share our eyes.
"I would curse my life. I would carry my Memories of you and write to Their gifts as a poet would to nature, unending and without reservation. I would spend my only free and fleeting moments of every day recounting my thoughts of you,"
your hand traces the length of my arm,
"to you, through you."
You don't smile at this, as I intend. Instead, you clasp your fingers over mine; these threads of skin weave our link manifest. You let me draw a dark line of fallen hair from your eyes.
"I don't know what I would do," you sing, you whisper. "I would cry so much . . . You know the fits of tears that make you think you'll die before you're through?"
I nod, you continue, "I would write you, too. I would never go outside, I would sleep in a mound of your belongings, I would read all of your words until I'd memorized them, and they could ring in my head until I could hear you. As if you were just in the next room. With me."
You pull your legs close to you as you lay on your side, the sheets sigh from under you and the rain begins to clamor like an army, charging on a distant plane.
The plunge of your eyes sinks deeper still in the scattered light from a lamp in the storm that has spread through the window trapping shapes of the rain, and the whole of our room is a blanket of tears.
"Do all things have to end?" You ask me, or the space, or your God. I shudder, out of a sadness wretched in my heart, how you always ask the most beautiful things.
"Why do those who love have to lose it?"
I search for a reason in the shapes of the rain on the ceiling, and your hand moves to my heart.
I don't know this, because I don't know anything, but I say it, because it sounds like the truth: "Maybe . . . because we can't know the weight of its value, until we understand the grief of its absence."
I look back to you and your eyes rise from this sad room, they return to me. Your lips spread in the center - a keyhole, and you remain silent until I smile, your eyes asking what?
You are so beautiful, that I cannot hold it in mind, that when I see you again, whether in an instant, whether in a year, I see you for the first time, surprised, still, and still, by you.
You turn to your stomach and your hair falls in black streams and shadow around you, and you touch my lips with your hand, and I could cry, or smile, or scream, and it would all mean the same thing.
I wish that happiness did not remind us of the sadness we're free from. I wish it had no memory.
I kiss your hand, I tell you, "I want to live forever, with you, in this place."
You smile to that, and for it I am happy, happy like the sound of a swing over whispering grass, happy like a roller coaster and brass instruments swelling to crescendo, or the sound of wrapping paper being torn asunder, happy like two people, in love, in the rain.
"You would tell me anything to make me smile, wouldn't you?"
"Anything that was truth," I tell you.
"You wouldn't lie to make me happy?"
I think about this for a moment, I am always surprised at how clever you are. "No, I think I would, but only if it was a white lie."
"So, if it were a deep and twisted lie-"
"I would never let it leave my mouth."
"Even to make me happy?" you ask once more.
You rise to your knees and spread your arms through the air. I meet you at your eyes, and you tumble back into the bed and cover the warm blankets to your chin. I lean toward you and you take my cheek in your soft fingers, and we hold the smallest space between our lips, your lashes blink on mine, your breath, mine, our breath, bound on the static air, and a diamond erupts in that black wind of the storm like a thunderbolt we lean to taste in our lips, slow, sparse, immense.
I am lost in you. Vision pendulates to the swelling tide of our breath, fading on the lapel of your palm turned on the patches of sunlight or skin - a leaf that ladles dew - it tears for in soft grasps under silk and cotton, or I close my eyes and open them. The dying rain coils in our swift gasps, the music of the movement of abandoned fabrics buried in a nest of dancing skin spirals on the frame shaped in collar bones and ribbed shades and bowed knees, perfume or sweat festering between blood and blush - the circular surrender housing the triangles of feet, toe to toe, the raveled cadence of nipples lost to fields of hair and nerves or rivers given way to floods starving, flowing for the bounce of stars and suns swallowed in your cries sung in stanzas poetry pours to mimic, to scathe the wells that fall, the cities that collapse, to the weight of your head on my heart when we are beaten, when we are battered, when we are naked and the rain is gone, and we are happy. Our breath and our skin, these are the only things between us, over which we share our eyes. And I am lost in you.
I cannot sleep, yet. But soon you are fast to dreams, and your hair runs over me.
I take a deep breath and sigh, and you stir to turn away from me. I roll to my side and listen to a clock lost somewhere in the dark, and I feel my eyes drift closed when you speak to the walls, to me,
"Will we always be together?"
Your voice is a blade, glimmering on a fault, still in the night, just before sunrise.
"Yes," I lie. And then I fall into a swift and dreamless sleep.