The Apple

When I was young, my mother would let me play in the garden next to our house, and this is where I met my little snake boy.

He was not a real snake. Nor exactly a boy. But he wasn't make-believe, despite what my indulgent parents pretended not to think. He was my little snake-boy. Tall and expressive as a regular boy. But where skin usually lay its fortress between self and other, his body was covered with beautiful iridescent scales from head to toe. Even his curly dark hair had that rainbow sheen and the locks flew out over an imbricated scalp.

Where my eyes were dots over blue, his were long slits over amber. When our eyes met, we made little exclamation points between us. Water and sky blending with fire and earth to complete some essential cycle. That was how it felt.

I couldn't say exactly when we met. It felt in so many ways as if we'd always known each other. Always played together. Surely we must have met, but I guess I was too young to note it. The "imaginary friend snake" was legendary and traced to years before I ever would have ambled the garden alone.

We were the dearest of friends, as only children can be. With a flick of his little forked tongue, he conjured such poetry for me. And I fed my fantasies and curiosities into our cauldron of creation. We rode camels through snow fortresses. Commandeered clouds to visit the stars. Fought princesses to save dragons. And murmured the nothings of youth that contain secrets of the universe only children ever know.

On sunny days, he'd bask at my back in the middle of the grass. I, a human heat rock, putting out warmth and soaking in that guileless affection he returned. How my warm hand cooed to feel the sweet smooth bumps of his as we stared into the fauna in a sapid silence.In the snow, we'd wrap ourselves together in coats and blankets, my heat flushing us both. Always warm. Always sweet.

My friend. My little snake-boy.

Days and seasons passed and still we met, refusing to heed the elements that threatened our daily meetings. Rain became oceans to pull our ships through. Snow, the arctic caves of untold demons. Sleet was merely diamond falling from the sky. A hurricane would have been a giant's bad head cold.

Our worlds only intersected there in the garden and - to us - that was how it should be. Though sometimes I wondered what would happen to us when the garden was no more. When I went away. Or perhaps when he left. But only sometimes. Only thoughts that rapidly floated to the periphery amidst secrets and adventures.

!!!!

Then came my twelfth birthday. An important day, we both felt. Things had long threatened to change; blossoms felt about to burst. I'd been dragged through a hundred preambles of how my body and mind would morph in the coming years. Jokes about the looming "teen years" from my parents were endlessly creative and foreboding. And I noted the evolution and stirring of certain sensations when particular others come into my orbit.

It was a full, busy day and I was hard-pressed to make our daily appointment. Only through some deceit and half-truths did I manage to carve the time. Late and very tired with cake and celebrations, I was afraid he'd have given up on me. But, as always, he was waiting at the bench where we most liked to sit. His little amber eyes flickered when I entered their orbit.Slowly, he rose to hug me so tightly I lost my breath.

"You are grown, now?" His own voice broke, presaging other looming changes.

I laughed. Twelve felt old at the time, but I knew how much was left on the gamut to adulthood.

Shyly, he presented a small bijoux from his coat pocket.

An apple. But unlike any I'd ever seen. An ombre sunset in a tiny globe no bigger than my 12 year old fist. My nose reeled with the heady sweetness the skin alone exuded. My heart fluttered like a wild bird desperate to escape its rib-cage, strangely intoxicated by its aura.

"My family says I will have one of these when I am almost grown. And that when I've finished it, I will be grown. I thought perhaps, in lieu of more cake and treats..."

It is hard to describe a rainbow blushing, but it made my skin tingle to see just that in my friend's changing face.

"It's from a very rare tree," he explained. "Once you've had one, you will never need another. Its sweet-tart will be with you forever." He shrugged. Clearly unsure what he meant.

I laughed again, not understanding, but giddy with the day. Giddy with his tone and importance. Was I truly grown in his eyes? A woman? I flushed a mild crimson and snorted in a very inelegant fashion.

Shyly, I squeezed his hand and kissed his scaly cheek, blushing with unexpected heat. Whatever came from him was the sweetest and richest of treasures. I knew that and no more.

Should we try some? I asked.

He coughed. "I don't think I'm grown yet," he stuttered.

"You and I have grown together. If I'm grown, then you must be."

He cocked his head slightly, flicking his lips with a nervous tongue.

"Am I?" I hesitated, dropping his hand. "I don't know that I feel very grown even still. Perhaps next year? For most things, adults are 18. Maybe then? Or before college? How do you know you're grown"

He shrugged and shook his head. "So silly of me. I got so excited, I didn't think. Please think nothing of it." he said, sadly. Looking at his hand, a little tear welled, disappointed to fail me with a premature offering I supposed. He shoved the bauble back in his pocket and stepped back into the bench.

My heart fluttered again. "No, no," I said, grabbing his wrist and donned my bravest face. "I can be ready. I will be if you hold my hand! It smells amazing! I want to taste it!"

How sweet that small fruit smelled. How its aroma danced in my nostrils and triggered rivers in my mouth!

I took the fruit in my hand surprised at its heft and substance.

The first bite:  my teeth tearing through skin and pulp like feet crunching a dance in fresh fallen snow. When the juice exploded against my gums, I tasted all of heaven.

True heaven. I felt every moment of love and affection in my life, those had and those yet to be had. Coursing through my veins and bursting through my pores was unadulterated love. The warmth of the womb. Suckling in my mother's arms. Grandparents and relatives I'd not learned to remember. I felt a million embraces, and slowly a soft stimulating squeeze on my shoulder. Lips tracing lines on my body. Skin crushing away the distance between organs... bliss in every guise.

"Ahhhhhhhh" managed to rumble in my throat as I pressed our intertwined hands against my snake-boys' face. Our eyes exclaimed for one short burst, before a piercing scream overtook the moan.

Surprised to hear my own voice, I reeled straight into an agony I could never have fathomed. I felt my mother's bitter sleepless tears as she quietly begged me to finally, finally sleep. Flares of acid anger between mother and father where their ways of loving me clashed. I felt the ripping pain of loss, loss of trust, loss of reliance, loss of certainty, loss of the unimpeachable expectation of love. The surest awareness that my parents would die. I knew that my friends and I would grow apart. How often my dearest friends were destined to become strangers again. How often affinity was circumstance alone. How fragile it all was and how contrived. I felt love after love and comfort after comfort ripped from the deepest pit of my core. Watching every loved one betray, leave, die, forget...

I saw my little snake boy frozen in terror, staring at my face, flinching from my hand's force. Terrified. Unfamiliar. Unable to understand. Apart.

Anger welling inside of me, I cursed and swore. Wresting my hand from his, I pushed him so hard we both fell back away from each other. Still shaking with horror and rage, I landed heavily, the piece of apple lodging in my throat.

I remember less from there. I know he did not save me. I know he was not there when I woke up in a hospital bed several hours later. My last memory was of my dear little snake boy falling backwards and away- suddenly silenced - while I could no longer call to him.While he didn't even know my breath was blocked.

From my understanding, another visitor had found me. I'd coughed out the apple on my own, but in that stir, had hit my head quite soundly on a little statue near the fountain.

I was ill for days, though there was no particular physical etiology. There was a brief dalliance with therapy that I studiously attended, keeping my thoughts and feelings hidden in a polite compliance. No particular trauma was identified, and everything was chalked up to an overstimulating birthday party, some stolen sips of wine, and some fight with a little boyfriend or other.

While I recovered, I thought of going back to the garden with a mix of terror and anticipation. I gathered strength with this end in mind, but had no idea how that strength would be channeled. Had I hurt him? Did I want to hurt him? Had I forgiven him? Had he forgiven me Would he ever see me the way he had before? Would I embrace him or beat him when we met again?

He wasn't there, the day I finally was well enough to go. Or for several days after. And then I knew nothing would ever be the same.

***

We all live with the understandings I gleaned that day. We all carry on, and so did I. Though not without that wariness we come to carry.

 Love came and receded with a tidal flow. My parents lived on. They failed me. We repaired. I failed them. We repaired. Not always tidily. Trudging through those legendary teen years, I learned that life was sloppy and that our struggles were ultimately our own. That we float through distinct pains and agonies, always tangent and never touching. I knew the craving for connection and how only the smallest tastes and illusions would slake that thirst and only for so long.

Loneliness and I became interwoven. Not the boredom of naptime and time outs I'd remembered from childhood. This loneliness thrived in crowds and ran rampant howling through intimate relations. It clung to the constant awareness that we bear our lives apart. That we see nothing the same. That love runs its course on separate timelines for each of us.That what felt like love was sometimes only whim, boredom or pride.That nothing separates us faster than our misfortunes and pains.

Begrudgingly I tried to ignore the loneliness, and to cherish - where I could - the moments where it faded. The pressing of flesh to flesh. The seconds lost in another's gaze. The shared laugh. The timeless moments meant to fade and the echoes of their memories. Those illusions of connection. I stifled the knowledge of death as best I could. I tried to live in the moment as time tore me through moment after dissonant moment.

I studied anger from every angle, and met the fear and sadness the sparkled through its prism. I'd never been an angry child, but I made up for that in my teens. My friend had betrayed me, and he was only the first to do so. He gave me a gift I could not bear, and left me when it had its poisonous effect. Variations on that theme were always present. Every subsequent failure of friend or family echoed that moment and that look. Every gift carried a tinge of apprehension.

But over time, I learned also concern and sadness were never killed by anger.

I learned affection outlives betrayal. That missing isn't dependent on some objective worthiness. That license granted to one's central being was irrevocable. I felt the absence of my little friend so strongly that it amounted to its own presence. The way I tried, and mostly failed, to find that sameness that once came so easily. Those exclamation points.They morphed within me, creating their own narratives.

 The anger faded to disappointment; a constant lingering disappointment coating and dulling every other feeling.

Each soft hand reminded me of the smooth scales it lacked. The warm bodies I pressed to my back felt infernal. Chatter of poetry, art, politics, celebrity, day to day life: all stimulated in some way, but remained colorless against those remembered confidences of youthful fantasy.

 Riding the bus to work, sometimes, I'd close my eyes and revisit one of our old fantasy haunts. Hoping, sometimes, to find him there. Sometimes I caught a flicker, but always his back as he ran away.

In time I stopped looking even within myself. Though he was never fully gone. His memory kaleidoscoped in a million fragmented directions. Bits and pieces of him (and all the people I'd since left or lost) reflected in every surface. But in such small glints, one would be hard pressed to trace the element back to any one quality or element. More and more attenuated as time passed. And time kept passing. Life kept living and dragged me along in its currents.

Then one day we found each other again.

Sort of.

Not what I would have expected: A tall man with dry, perfunctory peach skin. Ordinary dark hair. A slight beard covering up the well chiseled angles of his face. Behind tinted glasses, his eyes were largely hidden.

Nor did they meet mine, ours both diving to the ground with an instinctive shyness unfamiliar to us. We stood together in line without a sliver of recognition for several minutes. Each of us queuers so wrapped in our individual cellophane of illusory privacy and digital escape.

 If the writhing mass of people hadn't lurched like a grumpy beast. If I hadn't stumbled. If he hadn't caught my arm without thinking. If ... if something hadn't felt different in that brief clasp. If my scalp hadn't tickled just so with a premonition.

"You!" I whispered, provoking a visceral wave through his body, which rebounded through mine.

"You? a whisper returned.We stepped back with ceremony to see each other.

"But how? What happened...? You've changed!" I gulped out rudely.

"This is how we grow," he shrugged. "But you. You have changed, have grown too. More than... more than... you were young. We were so young.." A ripple spread across his taut cheeks, and I imagined that boyish tear of disappointment. Across this grown man's face, stretched something I didn't fully recognize.

We laughed a small painful round to fill the silence between us.

"It was a long time ago," I cleared my throat sheepishly. The anger so very far away, but the fear remaining. My empty hand itching. Neither hugging nor beating was present in my body. Simply a tentative hesitancy, as if my friend were made of paper and readily crumpled with a wrong breeze, and a yearning for the moment not to end. A need to hoard every second of this passing encounter, even as it too held a small twinge of disappointment.

We sat outside a cafe that day, saying little. Breathing deeper breaths, ever deeper. Shivering from our respective corners of the bench, but warmed somewhere deep inside.

As we parted, he hesitantly flicked a finger against mine. Our eyes connecting through glass to form little question marks.

 "You are still she, my friend. My friend..."

"Yes," I stuttered. "My ..." I trailed off... My little snake boy was no longer little nor a boy. Nor really a snake. How was he at all the same? And yet. There he was. I felt the space between us fill with flavors I'd nearly forgotten. I smelled his soft scents. I tasted hints of his breath, and saw camels and adventures. My palm replayed the cool roughness of his finger, that roughness my hand had sought in every hand since.

".. my friend. My dear, dear friend. Please let's do this again. Soon!"

And we did. Never the same place. Always hesitantly. But feeling the warmth grow. I remembered fantastical stories we'd shared. Who we'd been. All the different characters and facets of potential selves. Seeing myself, the heroine, again layered my inner chambers with a fleecy warmth. Little buds planted deep inside stirred in the heat of my inner suns.

Over time we met more often and became more comfortable. We gradually shared our lives, piecemeal at first. Then we shared our stories. Our news. The minutia of our quotidian routines.Our random observations and associations.

 It wasn't the same, of course. Childhood and all its innocence lends itself to something inimitable. But it was ... nice. So very nice. I felt little ice floes begin to thaw.

We talked like grown ups then, but sometimes dragons and camels crept in in jest. It made my scalp tickle just so, and my hair bounce in invisible breezes.

He visited my apartment. I visited his. Sometimes we saw each other with friends. Sometimes alone. Sometimes we just watched tv together and argued about celebrity couples and thruples. Our lives were unfantastical. But some little magic permeated ever moment. The depth of wordless familiarity perhaps, though my gingerness remained.Still so delicate and so tentative.

***

One evening, we were finishing dinner at his house. While helping to clear the table, I opened his fridge. My body jolted to see what sat in the upper shelf of that fridge. Adrenaline burning through my chest. A small gasp, and I staggered back, dropping the leftovers I'd brought.

My friend rushed to my side. Seeing what I had discovered, he closed the fridge door with ceremony. His hand pressed little patterns through my shirt as it gently steered me back to the living room. My head rustled a little to feel the contact.

 Sitting across from me, my friend studied the floor intently. In a deep bass, he intoned, "I am sorry. More than you can imagine. More than I can ever say."

As if to leave it at that, he stood again and began to walk to the table.

"But... how?" I managed to murmur out.

"How what?" he turned and offered me my water glass.

"It is what I think it is, isn't it?"

His eyes fell like a feather in the breeze, and his body matched the descent as he alit on the far edge of the sofa.

"The fruit, you mean," he said with a window rattling sigh.I felt him near me again, our breath eroding the space between us.

I said nothing.

Slowly he stood, removed himself to the kitchen and returned, a small apple in his hand. Again my heart found wings to beat against its cage.

Still a sunrise ablaze. Still dazzling white meat. A little twelve year old bite marking mountains in the middle.

"I was wrong then," he said. "It wasn't time. I am so so sorry. I could never ask you to forgive me." 

I laughed nervously again, a mix of nausea and overwhelming hunger battling in my belly. The sweet fruit saturated my senses.Small currents of anger, fear, and sadness beat against each other, filling my throat with lumps and bouncing my heart like a ball from a skyscraper.

"We were children. I was a child. I had no idea what you would taste. What it would show. But... When it was my turn, God, I saw. You and your face and all that I had given to you. What you live with now... I've seen what you've seen. But I've also more. So much more."

For a moment our eyes flickered towards each other, then scattered apart in a spasmic jerk. Our hands nearly touching, yet infinite halves apart. I shuddered. He buried his gaze in the cushions.

Clearing my throat, I shook my head, unable to offer an unrequested absolution. Unable to understand. Unable to even question how such an object had remained, pristine, in his care.

The space to speak was slowly receding again. I watched it close with a mild anxiety, but could say no more.

I am ready, now," he suddenly announced. "It would be different. You don't ever have to see this again. But if you ever you want another bite, I will be here with you... if you want me."

He wiped his eyes hastily and returned the apple to the kitchen. We drank our teas in a crushing silence, until time and distraction lightened the mood. Small talk obdurately intervened to chase away the ghosts that hovered between us. After a time, I stumbled home and slept poorly. So aware that night that we were not who we had been. Mourning our innocence. More aware of the distance.

The morning after, my curiosity emerged. I could recall that first taste with timeless clarity. The spritz of juice. The ecstatic burst of sweetness. The crushing bitter that followed. Would it taste so bitter with all that I'd tasted since? Could anything surprised anymore?

The next night we were together, I asked about the apple. He didn't answer in ways I could understand. Only that it was from a rare plant. Only that he had kept it so long, caring for it as gingerly as he'd been unable to do for me. Only that if I ever wanted to taste again, there was more to it... I demurred that night.

And several nights after. He never mentioned it on his own, but some days I did. Some days I sought it in his fridge and stroked it gently the way one pets a wild panther before withdrawing nervously.

 Sometimes I'd forget the apple. Sometimes I would be so fully engrossed in life that I barely even saw my friend, let alone the wonder in his fridge. Sometimes we drank coffee at a shop and exchanged perfunctory pleasantries from a comfortable distance. Sometimes I dreampt of our childhood, when my back oozed its warmth into his cold but loving belly.

I don't know why that one night, it suddenly came back to me the way it did. I found myself at his door, quite late. Fresh off a professional disappointment. Recently having fought with my mother. Lonely for a never-quite-ex. Otherwise having lived life.

Having had a dream I couldn't remember, but which surely featured the spring-water-fresh juice of that apple in his fridge.

Knowing he'd be home and awake, and trusting his gentle invitation to stop by "anytime," I came. We talked pleasant nothings and serious somethings, while I nursed a tea and wrestled with some lingering guilt for the hour. A light pause settled on us like first snow. Drowsiness caressed us both. We settled deeper into the sofa and into each other.

Erupting from that peace, I found myself demanding how could one know if they were grown.

He shrugged and said it didn't matter, really.

I flinched indignantly. As if perhaps, he were implying I was still a child. That he had eaten his apple and I had recoiled from mine. Almost heady with dare, though none had really been offered, I pressed on.

"That damn apple? When would I be ready? According to the big whoevers who set this all in motion."

"You?" he snorted a little puff. "Only you can say that. I only know that I am ready."

"I want to try it." I said, surprising myself with unanticipated resolve.

"Then I would say, you're ready," he intoned this with a patina of hesitancy that rankled ever so. I shared his doubt. Wasn't I doing this to prove something as much as I'd once tried it to please him? Was that really ready?

He solemnly sliced the apple and arranged it on a plate. A rough hand extended towards mine as I picked up the first bite - a piece worn down with my little teeth marks.

"I'm here," asserted a voice so solid it inhabited the room. And somehow, in that thick velvet proclamation, I did feel ready.

And so I bit down, the crunch echoing through the room and down into my toes with such resonance.

The rush was the same as before, though now so much more familiar. The same sense of love and blissful dependence. The same turn to pain and disappointment. My mother's tearful angry face. The flinch as she realized how much she wanted to hit her crying child. The hatred that flared between parents in rapid moments of forgetting. Profound disappointments. Anger. Eye rolling. The stench of their fallibility and mortality.

I winced. The anger had bled out of me. The hurt pooled. A rough hand, fingers coiling mine, heaved me back to that quiet room and stifled my gag reflex.

I picked up the second piece. The blossoming of new friendship and the succor of enduring ones. The ecstasy of interpersonal exchange, and the rush of trust and giddy intimacy. Like a roller coaster cab cresting the peak, it rapidly devolved into the doubt, the resentments, the misunderstandings and - worst of all - the echoing ambivalence of lost connection. The drifting apart, "outgrowth" that felt more like shrinking. And again the loss. The death. The hurt. I gasped but continued to swallow, squeezing deeply.

The third piece. Passionate love. Deeper than the bodies that acted out their spiritual frenzy for union, the unquenchable thirst for consecration. I felt the dizzying rush of ecstasy in objects associated with a name, with a touch, with a breath. I imbibed the cherished breath, tasted the mesmerizing flavor of body and heart, melted into the defenseless giving and taking of souls.

And predictably, I saw lovers look on my bare and hopeful body with flashes of disgust. I saw my heart buried in indifference. I saw the boy I'd left because I loved him enough to know he deserved not-me. The boy who'd left me because love scared him. The female friends who'd loved the boys I'd loved, where we realized the limits of sharing and of our own bond. The choices that weren't mine to make, and the unpredictable consequences of those I did make. The anxiety. The jittery worn out agonizing addictive misery of unreciprocation. I saw the death of love and the hollow feel of its corpse.

 I felt loss, again and again the death and pain; again and again my parents and friends flashing away as they failed to support. Failed to feel. Failed to understand. Failed to be what I needed them to be. Failed by me. Failed by fortune. I gulped in the loneliness that only a severed connection can create. I felt the falling into a black space so heavy all self, hope, and imagination were crushed. I crumbled and winced, hanging by a tight rough hand.

I ate the next piece. I felt a child, my child, growing in me. Felt what it must have meant to be god creating universes, dizzy with a sentiment "love" can only hint at. I felt the ecstatic revelation and selfish-selflessness that pulled all the earth inside out and upside down. The tendrils in everything in every sense. The merging of beings rediscovered against the breast, in the simple glow of symbiosis.

 I felt the warm velvet of a small hand in mine.

And I felt it ripped from mine.

 I felt the empty muted hollow of staring at my child and feeling nothing. Of anxiety so crushing my bones shook. The helplessness of an entire soul's well-being being placed on the shoulders of a young life with ill-formed ideas of its own.. I felt the anger and the doubt. The failure. Constant failure in a million tiny ways every day. How the hope fed the loss. Finally the loss. Like nothing I could ever describe. The isolation beyond all words. I felt the world live and die a million ways, disintegrating every bone and tissue and organ in its path..Child born and unborn, mine and never mine. alive and dead, in a seemingly endless loop. I understood the world I'd thrust this child into. The pain waiting outside the birthing room. How little I could do.

As the apple went down bite by bite - hand squeezed/squeezing so hard my bones nearly crushed - the beauty and the agony merged together. Death and life blurring into each other with such shouting screaming presence that I couldn't even feel as much as be filled to bursting. Each moment expecting that explosion, each moment stretching a little wider. Love and hatred, genocide and sacrifice. Religious ecstasy and religious massacre. The rise and fall of civilizations, and the individual breaths and fears of every living soul within those. I swallowed every bite, shaking and sobbing unaware of what I was even witnessing. What I was feeling. It all hit so fast, an existential vertigo tearing through my body.

All I felt - all that was left to feel - was my friend. Rough, cool arms wrapped around me. So tight that I could barely move or breathe, but somehow anchoring me from spinning beyond the gravity of the earth.

Dizzy, my eyes landed, then, in those slits across amber. Dark glasses gone. Gaze plunging deeply into mine. Suddenly brighter than the hottest dessert sun. Glistening. Burning into me.  Anchoring the darkest center of my being. Pushing back the void away.

The last apple slice was in my free hand then. As I stared into my friend's eyes, I saw my own death - not from my eyes, but from his. I saw that no matter how kind, no matter how selfless or thoughtful, my life would inflict such pain. Perhaps through cruelty or indifference, but just as likely through every sweet and loving offering of self I made to him, every gesture taken to intertwine our lives. The way our mingled roots would rip self from him along with me. How my misfortune would become his.

I saw my memory in him. The hole my absence had seared into his core. I saw the hands that weren't mine. And the acid remorse and fear and longing and missing. The loss. The loss that would come again in time. That I could never prevent other than to disappear completely and even then it was too late.

From my overwhelmed and helpless place, I felt a flurry of feeling, a desire to hold him to me and me to him. Not to comfort but simply to press into this person who had made himself so vulnerable in that caring. To emboss myself into his bones so thoroughly that I Could never be missed and always would be there.

 I felt my own death in this moment - in every future moment - through his marrow.  My breath spurted out, narrower and weaker in each second. As I fell in and out of swoon, in and out of him. I felt the depths of his pain. And I felt the depths of his love. And they were the same.

Eyes dropped fully into mine, he whispered "it is all love. All." He crushed my head into his chest as if to press it fully against his heart.

I crumbled forwards into him, sobbing as he sobbed. As we sobbed. Clinging so tightly to each other that bruises and blisters congregated in our points of contact. Still we held.

And somehow as the final bite went down, I knew things I could never put words to and some things I can. I knew that time is a joke we play on ourselves. That love is never lost, never fully accepted but always there. I knew eternity wasn't some outside afterlife but a presence in every moment, fully saturated in existence. I knew...

I knew every particle of the friend pressed into me. I felt my cells dissolving, constantly replenishing - both of us always new but always intertwined.. Losing form at the boundaries, molecules fizzing between us. Whole systems aligning - breath to breath, heart beat to heart beat, chemicals dancing in our brains in a call and response. Never fully the same, but always connected.  

And I knew my friend's breath. I knew every particle of air that burst through his veins, up his lungs and against my neck. Every blood cell. Every ventricle. Every fire of synapses. I knew it would be lost if I tried to note them, observe them or do anything but feel. So I felt.

I felt this. And only this. And the tension seeped from my body in that feeling. Gravity turned every ounce of me into a floppy rag-doll of self in my friend's arms.

 And he laughed with such weariness. And I laughed with such wonder. And we cried and laughed again together, bodies aching and seething from the night's experience. Falling back, then, we slept without intent, waking only in sotten spurts through a long noiseless night. Locked in each other's battered arms. Dreaming together wordless images and eternal truths. Finding those camels and castles and seeing again in all new lights.

In the morning, we said nothing to each other. It no longer felt necessary. The silence was verdant, fecund, we were so fully rooted in it then.

Like sleepwalkers, we strolled down the street together, hand in hand like old. Hardly tracking where our feet fell or how our bodies glided through space.

Until, somehow, we found ourselves entering that old garden. Hardly changed in all these years.

My friend tugged towards our old bench and I followed. Sitting together we stared just shy of the sun, still climbing to its ultimate seat above the trees.

I kicked off my shoes and he did the same, and we dug our toes into the mud beneath us. Laughing noiselessly, pressing our shoulders and arms into each other at times to jostle and laugh again. Full of inner jokes and wonder beyond words.

Blinking in the sunlight, I glanced at my friend. Then I saw it with a gasp. His dull skin shone like a sky on fire. His beard flickering glints of color. Each scale a nacre sheen more beautiful than I'd remembered. His hair rose like some infernal fire, glimmering and sparking the darkest rainbows.

"My little snake boy!" the words exploded from my mouth like an animal uncaged.

 His darting eyes collapsed into mine in fractalized "!!!!!!," a certain shocked glee buzzing through his fulgent scaly face..

"My sweet butterfly girl" he laughed, tiny tears sparkling across the diamonds of his cheeks.

My scalp tingled as little flutters blossomed down my neck and around my crown, tossing my hair in giddy waves. Thousands of wings whirled about my face in flashing glints and puffs of air, lifting me slightly aloft with every inhale.

Embracing like castaways falling upon solid ground, our bright and dark interwove. Hair dancing with hair. Skin tickled with wings. Heat absorbed and returned in fondness. Flying ever so slightly.

Giggles like tinkling crystal, tossed light against the deepest shadows. Setting the garden ablaze in pure light. A purity that was blind to nothing. That saw all and was deeper for it.

And when we stopped laughing, our voices echoed on into a riant silence. A silence richer and darker than all that was and wasn't there before the light's big bang.

And there we were - my little snake boy and his little butterfly girl - in the garden. Roots intertwined. Blossoms growing towards each other.

Together.

 In that moment.

And that was everything.

The only thing.