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.

Story Time - 2008/2019 Edition

I was rereading a travel log from my Bs As summer in '08. Found a couple of unfinished stories. Wish I'd known where I'd been planning to go. Original fragments reworked now 2019.

The Demon in Her Eyes

I haven’t always had the best life. For the most part, it’s all good, but every once in a while it wears through.

Hold up. This isn’t supposed to be about me. It was gonna be about her, not me. Her and me. But to understand her… well, my vision of her, I am at least a bit relevant. Still, let's start with her.

We met etc. Within seconds of pleasant conversation, I found my body surging with curiosities about hers. How would the round of her head fit against the center of my palm? How would her hair scrunch between the webs of my fingers and would it tickle or scratch my finger tips How would that solid crown compare to the thick jelly of her breasts in my same palm? Would her nose find a knotch above my clavical or would mine in hers? How would my belly curve against the transition between the small of her back to the acme of her ass? Which finger would fit just-right in her cupid’s bow? How would my arm fit against her waist?

My earlobe wanted to investigate the nape of her neck. My lips wanted to drag across the fuzz of her earlobe. My fingers to trace the little crinkles that flashed about her eyes when she smiled. My forehead craved to compare pores with hers. My skin everywhere wanted to know the relative temperature and humidity of her breath. My inner ear wondered if that crystal laugh would acquire more gutteral intonations in moments of abandon. My nose wanted to catalog and map her scentscape in endless atlases of anatomy. My arm hairs stretched to tangle in hers.

You get the gist. All of me wanted all of her. It was mutual. Very good start.

But now, I really should add a little back story.

I had a shit family. And consequently a shit childhood. I dealt in my youth with a priggish moral rectitude to shame Jesus. I rose above it all, the white sheep in the pig sty. If there was a moral resume builder to be found, I probably ran it by my teens. Man did my farts ever smell great. You know the type.

This is where it gets melodramatic, so I’m gonna rev up and rush through it. Kid turned up dead one night and not a pretty death. Foster brother. Long story, but I was nice to him despite his unacceptably glaring "queerness" (not ok in my particular town). Misinterpretations of "kindness" flourished way before the foul play. It got worse after, and I got dragged into months of investigation accusation and complete repudiation from all those virtuous character building institutions. Thank god for DNA and... well that's another story and not really the point.

I rose out of it like a battered phoenix and flipped the bird homeward, before settling into a far more comfortable goodish-enough moral stance. I came out of it alright, I’d say. Glad for the pecadillos my last rigid stance allows me.

Yeah, I had a crap beginning, but it’s been good from there. I have my jobs. I have my friends. My hobbies. Aside from a tendency to strike people just a little wrong, I’m pretty much just “normal” to industrious. Though I won't let the world forget what I've mucked through and how solidly I have. I guess sometimes people are just unlucky, and I take a fair but of pride in my survival of that condition.

I have just made myself more interesting than her. Sorry. It’s a thing I do. If we’re being honest - which lord knows we might not be being - I don’t know enough about her to make her independently interesting. I mean she was interesting, but that can get drowned out in the proximity to self. Sure a few things: She had a laugh that fluttered at your ear a bit like a dragonfly’s wings - first thing I noticed - and a surprisingly sharp tongue to cut through that syrup. She was never phased by me, which felt like a challenge. And there was always a sense she wasn't telling something vitally important. I liked that. And hated it. And, well, let’s just admit this was about me all along.

It's just that every once in a rare while, I start wondering if the luck isn’t random. If I’m not really an evil person, polluting everything he touches and sets about to care for. These usually set on me after half a bottle of whiskey, but sometimes the premonition of these thoughts is what made the whiskey appeal. Something some asshole parent whispered in my crib no doubt. And fuck ‘em for being so uncreative.

The point being it’s a rare and quarantined side of me, my whiskey soaked demon. Most people know my early life sucked, but all they see is a happy enough guy who probably pisses them off and they can’t say quite why.

So this is about her: she was an exception. Circumstances partially to blame.

Midway through our first date (I still indulge in these niceties, call me old fashioned), shit changed. We ran into a particularly hostile relation of my old friend “the dead gay kid.” Things got heated and loud. We’re talking “escort off the premises” kind of hostility.

I kept composure with a tight smile throughout, but something in me felt the crumple. I hadn’t expected it then. We're a long way from home. I had no idea anyone had followed me here. My defenses were diverted towards sparkling badinage and I recovered too slowly.

Shaken and already healthily inebriated I gradually shared “the story” with her.

“The story” itself is no big deal. Honestly, you would be surprised at just how well it gets a guy laid - pity and drama make potent aphrodisiacs. Did I mention the kid was all roughed up because my foster dad like to drink a little much and go to town on him? And me? True story. But I just laughed at him as he did.

The “big deal” was a little of that darker mood - the one that doesn’t think all this crap comes by chance, and sees its origins in yours truly - slipped out. Not the parody I affix to persona in time of great lust, but the demon itself.

At first the whole thing was mortifying, but then delicious. And then back and forth between the two off into the sunset.

Her reaction was hard to describe. Most women experience one or both of two reactions: (1) they recoil, as I’ve just taken myself off the eligible list and into the land of red flags, (2) they want to fix me, save me, and mend all the cruelties of the world through me.

The latter, as I’ve implied, has been a great boon to my sex life.

She seemed simply unsurprised. As if I were relating that the newspaper hadn’t been delivered on time. I don’t want to paint this reaction as cold or unsympathetic. Merely that it came across that all this was perfectly natural. Perhaps I simply couldn’t see her real reaction past some studied composure. I doubt it. In this lay profound relief and a rare sense of intimacy.

Like puss from a boil, I let that side drain out in her unphased presence. The story expanded, bringing in more and more detail from birth to present. Talking almost to fill the space that she held without flinching or soliciting. Binding us together with tendrils of tenderness and terror. When the tears had dried and the comfort been applied with a surgical precision and a nurse’s attention, we consecrated this bond with our own catharses.

Things were back to a good start. My body got its answers and raised new questions. Always new ones. Infinite arroyos and mesas to query. Infinite little folds to discover. A full language of breath. An endless subtlety of blushes. In a different universe, I would have written book after book, tirelessly forging further.

The side effect of all that open space and intimacy being - unfortunately - that this side became more and more connected to her and essentially associated with her. To become the happy regular person I really am, it felt urgent to flee. In this was the mortification. The more I confided, the I feared. The more resentment I felt for what she saw and drew out of me. But the more that side riled, the more it needed to be bled. Dependence and disgust set in in tandem.

If she hadn’t seen. If only. We would have had such fun. We still did. But there was a half-life to it. She confided nothing in me, yet gifted me with staggering vulnerability anyways. I recoiled from my own by caring for her. Little rescues. Little attentions. gentlemanly things that she accepted graciously but also without surprise. Always without surprise.

It would go well. So well. Bodies fitting in bodies in novel origami. Sometimes exciting. Sometimes languorous. Sometimes silly. Soft and innocent. Like precocious children washed of original sin in one healing bath of laughter and affection. So it would start.

Then it would go… well… poorly. We don’t have to get into that. I’m not a saint, obviously. Broad strokes, I’d panic to see my demon reflected in her eyes. I’d vanish. I’d lash out. She’d lay out her needs soberly. I’d decline. We’d shrug and resolve to part. Then: Tears. Recriminations. Space. Mourning.

And then some lonely night, a little alcohol, and a joke that only she would get. One more little question from my body of hers. The sole of her foot again my calf? The palm of her hand… how had it fit just so against my jawline. The flutter of her eyelashes against my cheek bone versus her lashes against my neck. That little gasp she took before a kiss: what key had that been in?

A joke. A question. A dialogue. A moment. And again the dance.

***

"I'm not the girl you'd have taken home, anyways," she slurred one bubbly sotten night of reconciliation/seduction "I'm a phase. Maybe I'll kick start some inspiration and remind you of your passions. Maybe I'll remind you how much you miss home or how you've longed to save the fucking turtles in the galapagos. Beautiful revelations and off you'll go again. I'm prolly the one before The One...but I like you an awful lot anyhow."

She shrugged in just such a way that my entire body spewed novels of questions about the slope of her shoulders and the tilt of her neck. "So what are you failing to work out that you're back again?"  Eyebrow arched in just such a way that I wanted to compare her upper eyelid to my cheekbone.

 A salty bitterment to her syrupy tone that teased my taste buds, before burbles of giggle teemed out and the mood changed again.

What was left to work out? I was certain at that moment that it was the exact curve equation of her upper lip. Perhaps what undiscovered ecstasies lay in her third left knuckle. The lunulas of her pinkies.

***

This cycle re-perpetuated itself as many times as we were both willing to allow. We must have known better. At first, I’d tell myself I’d make it up this time as a lover or - since that never worked - a friend. It always started well.

And when it didn’t end so well, it bothered me endlessly to imagine she was out there hating me, disgusted, or - so much worse - just forgetting me and all the little matryoshka ways our bodies and words interlocked. Leaving the demon with me alone again. That fear bonded me to her more deeply than all her fluttering lashes and tinkling laughter.

It always went the same, albeit in rapidly accelerating cycles: reconciliation, seduction, confusion, and bloody retreat. There were variations, but this pattern was never much revolutionized.

The seduction - if you give such a fancy term to something more akin to falling-back-into-configuration - became a see-saw of hysterical outbursts that I usually started. Typically, it began with my loneliness and ended with hers.

***

In a pique of hyberbole, sometimes I'd tell her I loved her. I still remember the jolt her flinch sent through my body. The way she'd look away, new railroad maps across her forehead, and close her eyes. Not surprised. Saying nothing.

Sometimes - as cycles wound down - I'd tell her no matter what, she'd always be a part of me.Things of that general nature. Things that felt true to me, and how she never left my mind. Sometimes it felt like she'd peeled back a layer of my skin and added a layer of her own. It stung. It itched. It was never settled. I wanted her to understand that. That she was never fully absent even when we were apart.

I remember her looking at me - unsurprised but deeply non-plussed. "Why keep coming around then if you have me so neatly packed up?"

I was usually sober enough to recognize a rhetorical question. Occasionally not.

Sometimes she'd add that when I left her that night - for a few hours or a few weeks, who could guess - she wouldn't be swimming around in my bloodstream like the booze I'd brought. She'd be there in her room brushing her teeth. Shaving her legs. Blowing her f-ing nose. And otherwise being a boring animate human being with some deep hurt and a nice side of self loathing. Whatever else I imagined. She'd cry or sneer depending on the prevalent hostility levels. Sometimes both.

Around that time, my hand would grow curious what sting it'd feel colliding with her cheek. Palm or back of hand? Both? Other queries grew up around this, before imploding into a heap of more generalized lust and loneliness.

I'd cry, she'd cry or continue to. We'd end up tangled in each other's arm. Part comfort. Part rebuke. Never sure what flurry of delusions would last the night.  Always a small bit willing to give it another shot.

***

There were exceptions. The first time barely nicked the skin. She understood. Wrong time. Wrong place. When opportunity arose to reconnect, she let that flow as well. It was beautiful, really. How I would have wanted it from the start. I was exactly what I wish I could have been the first time. In control. She melted into me and I tasted such concoctions of self and sudor.

But it wasn’t a clean reboot. The little demon was home in her arms, peeking from my solar plexus to suckle at her bosom while we slept. Domestic bliss possessed. When it fell apart, she didn’t seem surprised, a small sting in that fact.

The second required more than a few laughs, some apologies, and a rescue involving lost apartment keys after a late night out. New job. Stress. And again. Understandable. It got more tenuous. More ritualized. More… alcoholic from there. Never surprising. Always predictable. Almost scrawled in iambic pentameter.

Then there was that time so many months later. Different than usual. It felt dissociative. More of a reflex than an emotional act. Our bodies taking their inventories, finding their nooks and crannies. Our minds clamped down in a steely silence, too tired to engage in the same endless scripts.

As I was leaving that time, she smiled sardonically in a way that made my gut flip. Softening her eyes if not her lips, she declared that we were friends and there were no expectations. Neither of these statements was remotely true, though I wished they could have been. I agreed solemnly before wandering away. I felt tired, then, and cheated of her expectations, though I’d trampled every right to expectations in ways she had yet to discover.

I was - and remain - aware that her actual expectations involved some clauses I had failed. She’d expected I’d tell her if I wasn’t single anymore. When I was seeing somebody seriously. A somebody who knew enough and no more. And a somebody who most definitely expected things of me, fidelity in particular. I’m sure she would have expected me, given my previous declarations of principle, to give some effort to resist temptation if just a warning. I knew that had mattered to her. I knew she expected that. I’d known the last several times. Some things flow so easily. Others… not all demons were so bold to show themselves I suppose.

***

I didn’t necessarily know that my "someone" could be traced a few degrees to my “her.” That we’d be introduced with all the cringeworthy formalities at a party less than a week later. I can’t forget the exact configuration of teeny facial muscles that formed her expression when we locked eyes. The blankness about the pupils. As if the mirror I’d seen in her eyes suddenly flipped inwards and she finally saw it too. Or maybe she saw herself in some distorted fun mirror of my creation. I don’t quite know. Maybe us both.

Finally, I’d surprised her, and in such a terribly unoriginal way at that.

And that sudden overwhelming throb of shameful curiosity to know how her body would give and fold under that image came rushing over me in ways I am not proud to admit. Though it brings me still a burning pleasure to recall how it did; that night, at that party. With no remaining semblance of amicability or tenderness; only insatiable curiosity and fire. The speechless way her body begged to feel and feed back the hurt of her psyche: it fed into an unhinged libidinous violence of mine. It was jagged edges and nail marks and stinging fingers on flesh. A colonization where there had been tender exploration. The frenzy of what I can only describe as exorcism. No words exchanged. No apologies offered. No hope of redemption.

And then she was gone - without a word, without a glance,and finally quite truly free of expectation. The world was still. I was empty to the depths of my core. The space. The silence. I will never forget that either. Free. Purged. Empty.

***

I want you to understand, I’m no philanderer. If I'm in a relationship - and I take those seriously enough not to be in them often - then I know the terms and I follow them.. I’m no cheater. The odd lapse was always a “swept away in the moment” uncalculated kind of nothing soaked in booze. And I’ve always atoned. Almost always. There are different ways to atone.

There’s always an exception to the rule. That addictive something that can’t be treated with anything short of hexes or heroin. That little avatar on my phone waiting for a sensory twinge. A question I’d never meant to ask. A justification I needed to share. And I always thought it would just be a moment. An epilogue. A "one last thing!" Sometimes thought that.

I’d like to say I returned from that party stirred to reformation having worked out whatever thing she seemed to think I had needed to. I'd like to think that was a full exorcism and a full return of skin to skin.

She changed her number. But I never did go by her house, which I could have. Not while she was home anyways. Not up to her door. I thought better of it at some point.

 I have no idea if new cycles might  have continued. How would they have looked after that last reveal? Sometimes I wonder. Sometimes fantasize. Guiltily. Which heightens the fantasy. Cycles all their own.

I miss the tenderness, though, too. The Garden of Eden her figure's longitudes and latitudes somehow conjured. Before the apple's Eureeka moments. Before the shame. Before the snake. But there never was a before the snake. It was always there munching at every fruit tree, and watching patiently.

So I'm a bastard. But an average entitled prick bastard. This isn't caused by any shattered bit of past. Just a stirring of loins and a certain kind of self-negating erotic compulsion that's existed long before there was music to set it to song.

I'm not excusing myself. While I have always enjoyed a surplus of undeserved trust with minimal pangs of guilt, I know it will and should out somehow. The world is only so large. And well, I rub people the wrong way. I have crap luck. It’s only a matter of time before the good I’ve scraped together blows up again.

Before that self I saw in her eyes, fully realized that last night, emerges and finds itself in other eyes. This is why I’m not thrilled to have people out there with dirt on me, no matter how benign. Maybe not her, but somebody else she knew. Though it’s reassuring to remember how agonizingly discrete she was about every little thing.

But I’d like you to understand. I’d like somebody to understand and look me in the eye and show me what they see.

 I’ve changed since then, I think. I hope. I wish I could show her that. And remind myself of the exact angle and approach of her arm across my back, her head against my shoulder.

Sucky Psyche's Morning Tryst

Sucky Psyche's Morning Tryst

Crepe-crumpled skin panting for water like a hart weeping for God. Fingertips tingle with misfired neurons at the sheer shock of something so palpable. Moisturizing. A losing battle. Creams, unguents, oils, the sickly treacle of perfume blaring a luxury undelivered; arid aroma sinking its stinger into her eyes and ears as the heat of her body unleashes it. 

But life, the perpetual Sisyphean quest, minds those itches and flakes. Life will not suffer chillblains without a mew, a hem, and a concerted HA. If the ritual means nothing more than that, it means morning. And morning, in turn, means day. Day to day to day means the onrushing slip and slide of that savory sweet suspiration with all its flickering fancies. Without cream, would morning grind its way to the heady burble of bitter ebony brewing? Without the faint reek of fig and jasmine, would pajamas release their insidious sartorial snuggle?

Navigating every muscle, conjuring spring. Day will come. Day and she have a coffee date. She mustn't stand Day up, down or any which way but forward. Redolence of recalled cumin and garlic beat back the simper of jasmine, giving not a fig for fig as it streamrolls through her nostrils and coaxes a faint titter in her stomach. Palm to calf, she feels each nook and crevice of form, whispering "still here" "we exist" "we cry out for moisture"! Skin skates across skin. Legs lift and lower. Moisture-achievement-points unlocked.

Clothes rustle impatiently in the closet, waiting to be taken, tamed, and tangoed to the edge of time. A crisp "snap" of the bottle propels her, the tick-tock-tick-tock of some imagined clock marking time. The dancers take their embrace. Sleek, serpentine shimmies, and she has been shirted. Bare legs at attention as they brush the blushing cotton sheaths before them. Secada and a pant leg flies. Rapid gancho and a sandwichito. Pull up in media luna. The pants grumble and cadge, but succumb to her tugs.  

Awake? A faint shuffling of sheets smacks of stirring. No, no no, hisses her brain. Mornings are mine. Day is a flirt, but morning. Morning is my confidant, my singular tryst.

Freezing, pulse tick-tock-tick-tocking in deafening ebb and flow... stillness. Sheets hover and fall against the horny gate of sleepy-town with a snuffle and snore.

Breathing more lightly, she shakes her head, mind still murmuring "mornings are mine and mine alone"

"Now you're getting possessive about morning, are you? Weren't you just using it to get to Day?"

"Mornings are mine."

Nothing is yours, er, mine, she thought. Not really. Some can't cross the same river twice. I can't cross my own river once. Always somebody else's river. She felt swollen and stinking of fig.

"Mornings are mine" her brain moans like a sulking child. "You had a funny dream, remember it?"

Stumbling into slippers, she dodges a swarm of words strewn about the hallway: maundering maw, mordant maunder, salamander meander, maunder meahnderrrrr, mind 'er? oh oh oh, onerous oeillade.... Another shake of the head. "Gosh darnit, brain, didn't I tell you to put those toys away??"

"You did! You did dream!" Brain whispers. "Was it satan or seitan? Some angel, perhaps. You were both naked for various reasons. Not erotic. But you were wondering as you came back..."

"yes, we stayed up chatting in a grove over night. Then I had to get back..."

"back somewhere... but no clothes... why no clothes?"

"Because not even my dreams are that original?" somebody else's naked-dream fjording somebody else's river.

"Bare... all bare"

"Fuzzy wuzzy was a bear"

"bar...-en! Barren!"

"Bravo Freud."

"No, no, stay with me here" as if she has a choice. More words traipse past her without apology. cunctatious contumely; prosaic pulchritude, pulchritudinous prolixity, prolix prosaicism...

"I'm all dried up, huh brain?" Not even somebody else's river to cross!

"I wish you wouldn't call me that. Sounds like bran. So banal, no, banauseating!"

"Well, you ain't my wild oats. You want a name now?"

"I've always thought Psyche had a nice ring."

"psyche... psuke... suckeh sucky. Snob." A faint memory flickers of momentary twilight-waking. Her pajamas were twisted about her neck and threatening to flee. No doubt, the source of such profound oneiric symbolism that was the nudity of her dream. But always doubt. Especially about symbols. Dubious little beasts, symbols.

Undaunted, Psyche continues on, " Tell us a story!"

"Fuzzy wuzzy was a bear..."

"Don't play coy with me. Story!"

A pregnant pause. Sheets sigh gently from the other room. Gravid... gravidity gravitating gravely gutteral sobs as the pause suffers a contraction. Side stepping a drifting phrase, she changes her mind.

"coffee!" cries Id.

The coffee ritual has never been lavishly ceremonial. Neither is it medicinal. No need for caffeine to ward off the grog. Grog, a fickle lover, generally steals from her bedside far before the first hint of day.

In a fit of sacrilegious cretinism, she loads her basket with half-caff. Pre-ground. Not quite instant, that special slush of coffee Kool-Aid, but maybe in the future. Sifting dusty sand from her red bucket, and shoveling the basket beyond ullage. Always checking for a prize at the bottom of the bucket, but finding only mires of murky sand. It isn't the pop-fizz, but the sultry muck she seeks. A mouthful of the void for the shock of sudden wakefulness. The redolent regression into anonymity from poignant being.

Burble! sings Mr. Coffee. A very fine gent, Mr. Coffee. A bit of a fop in his patent panther gleam, but a dazzling interlocutor. A proper gentleman. A burbler of the highest principles. "Blub" he adds.

Drunk on ebony aroma, she shuffles towards the glaring blink of morning's rival. Blue, blank, blue, blank, blue, blank... notifications crying out to be noticed like newborns sobbing for food or love or return from whence they came.

"there, there, droid, there there."

Bank, ad, spam, meh.

A password or two to the next portal. Leaping from kitchen into the space between space, she enters a name that isn't hers and a password that only her fingers recall.

A torrent of voices cascade out, flooding the quiet space of morning deafening the delicate air.

"Politics, baby, share, baby, cat, baby, comment about baby, comment about mothering baby, food, politics, fifty things you've just eaten that will immediately kill you, baby, passive aggressive vagary being passive aggressively called-out, quiz, baby baby baby, gleeful bemoanment of maternal desperation, baby, uninspirational adage and stock photo, why bacon fried in coconut oil will make you lose twenty pounds, sunset, politics, RELIGION, cat, baby baby, opinion, snark, self-deprecating aggrandizement, me me me me baby..."

like-like-goose-like-like-goose.

"shhhhhhh"

Brain-bran-suck-Psyche, perks up: "Motherhood is a divine calling.” she murmurs in a faintly affected accent of unknown and shifting origins. “The initiation rituals are harsh and the lifestyle hermetic, but the mysteries inside... Shibboleth.  You wouldn't understand. They know. And they know you don't understand. Only a mother would understand.  Maybe a father. But not you. They all say it. They know. You don't. You are the unenlightened. A laic, peeking in at their alter. Your argot is yours alone. They only hear the babble and cooing and know you don't understand."

Groaning, she reaches towards Mr. Coffee’s warm embrace. Mr. Coffee has plunged the mysteries of the universe in all their pomposity and pretension. He sums it up with perfect pith: "Burble burble."

"No peeking at the altar. I promise, I'll wear my snot stained vestments dutifully and not presume to understand. No secret mysteries for the uninitiated."

"You have mysteries in you begging be born, but you won't let us play."

White box on the screen affects a modest mien, querying plaintively: "What's on your mind?"

LOG OUT.

"Mornings are ours"

"blurb blurb"

"Coffee"

"Let's play story."

"no story."

"Barren? All these lithe lexemes and voluptuous vocables" gestures to the dog pile of skittering nouns frolicking in the living room "But we can't play?"

"Coffee."

"blurb blurb"

Thin obsidian blithely tumbles across her tongue. The deafening echo of Saturn's silence plunging through her.

"Psyche needs Eros or she careens off the cliff!"

Erose, arrows, farrows, furrows careen into a table leg, shaking her steaming mug.

"Worst personal ad headline ever? Psyche needs Zephyr a lot more than Eros."

Pullulating palaver promenading...

"Pulchritudinous palaver! Let's tat a pretty pattern. Zephyr, erose, seitan whichever... let's be fruitful and exponentiate!"

Dragged from quiescence with a grumble "The world is swarming with stories. Stories telling stories to other stories about stories inside stories. The world needs another story like Hyacinth need a disc to the head. Shhhhhh, now."

"Barren!"

"burble burble"

"You're just a story I tell myself. And, I'm a story you continually concoct. We're both stories of some me-ness my parents dreamt up. We keep telling ourselves to our friends and they tell ourselves to themselves and themselves to ourselves. And we're all just a story the world drafted. Isn't that enough?" A group of gerunds scratch plaintively at the door. Adjacent, a shelf of books chants a siren's serenade: Read me. Re-tell me. Be me! Be us! Shall we waltz? Beast of two spines, grappling together and recreating ourselves again and forever!

"Barren is a story you tell ourself. But we know the better story. The real one. Clogged, not barren."

Tick-tock-tick-tocking. Morning slips like satin from her caress. Soon, Day will drop by carting its roar and rumble. With its carnival of fun-mirror images and plunky tunes. With a million singularities screaming for consideration: “I am” “I am” “I am”

"Fine, a story: So ham." Supple subjunctives slide into sardonic lotus-legs at her feet.

"Baloney!"

"I am that." Ommm fades to mmmmm as pithy steam embraces her olfactor.  

"Let's tell a memory! Nothing new. Just a memory!"

"Never the same river twice." A flash and flurry of illusory moments sprout from the steam. Coffees never tasted, but recalled. Simulacra of smiles flashed. Moments had and shared coursing through her veins and pressing the coffee’s dark obscurity into the crannies. Redolence of a diner hobbled together from twenty years of reconstruction. The fry and frazzle of imaginary bacon. A laugh clinking against cups. "Nothing new. Nothing old."  

"Nothing borrowed, nothing blue... Remember, you had a dream! Remember remembering it with me. And we talked, you on my metaphysical couch, or really more of a settee. You lolled, you nuzzled a gentle gerund, you bobbled and maundered the periphery of pandemonium. And I was insightful. Oh so insightful. And you drawled on about bears in a silly inside voice. And we laughed. Then we had breakfast cereal with fruit and cinnamon in it just like you like… Remember?”

But there had been no cereal! Coffee... she still had the coffee and remembered its birthing burbles... Remember… memories effervescing, efflorescing. The heat of a hand across hers some fifteen years prior summons a snippet of song. The song snuggles in with its panoply of times, places, scents and sensations: the brush of foot against a shoe, whiff of resin on maple, musk lingering on her cheek after a long embrace, the whir of hoppers, a pop of lemon pepper, the slow drip of tahini falling over onto Ben Fold-ing time into narcoleptic piano hums, wine gummies in a package sent to sooth a n’er’-for-broken heart, that rasp of cardboard against a finger… sensations assemble scenes, sessile yet seething, an ariose anomie of unadulterated being. Every moment imbricated upon itself a hundred times over, written and re-written, re-encountered on an endless coil. The all-ness of it. The simultaneity. She slumps back, coffee cup gallumping to the counter.

Licking their lusty chops, the words set in, as she knew they would. A faint protest, but too stunned to push back against the assault. Words, words, words! A tribe of words set upon being with the madness of Maenads, ripping, tearing, and shrieking in their reverie. Moments retreat, but some are weighed back by nets, ensnared and terrified. She shudders. Enough! A story? Spare the memories. Let’s find a story.

She didn’t tell them that stories have endings, and endings - with their improbably and impossible caesura - were something she never quite got...

"Once and always upon any and every time..."

Upstairs the bed sheets crumpled...