Smoke signals
Stuck in the middle of the road, waiting for my dog to finish sniffing an old tire, I imagine a long translucent thread unspooling from my chest. If I squint I can see it reflected in the sun: prismatic and thin, floating gently in the air; drifting out through the city and across the states to some imagined location where it coils tight around someone else.
“Limerence,” Taylor tells me. “Can be violent and destructive.”
“I know,” I tell him. “But it’s all I’ve ever known. To love someone is to be obsessed, fixated, desperate for reciprocity.”
“To love someone,” he tells me. “Is to be gentle. Kind. Safe.”
Fall is already near. The bright green is fading in slow trickles of orange brown and decaying death. I cannot feel it yet; the temperature is still too high, the afternoon sun blazing down, cooking the asphalt, and burning dark black patches into the yard. But, it’s almost here.
This is gonna kill me, wait. (a draft for a short story snippet)
Exhausted, each covered in the drying traces of the others’ sweat, [] traced faint loops and lines into his bare back. “One day,” he whispered. “Maybe this will be worth something.”
“What’s that?”
“Close your eyes,” he said. “Picture each line and tell me what it is.”
The afternoon sun was streaming in from a paper-thin window pane, painting the room in a hazy sickly summer light. He focused on small sensations; light finger looping and stopping. Goosebumps climbing up his arm.
“The outline of a signature.”
“An original,” he smiled.
“From a visionary author.”
“Or something else.”
“What else could you be?”
“A middle manager. Or perhaps a stay at home father.”
“A male model”
“That’s the type of thing you say to catch a man. Not when they’ve already been trapped."
“What can I say,” he chuckled. “I am a romantic.”
[] finished his tracing and turned over, staring up at the ceiling, arms stretched out, pink face blushing against the cotton-candy blue of the bedspread. “This is just a memory,” [] said. “A fling. You know that right?”
“I don’t,” He said. “I don’t at all.”
“You’re always more right than I am,” [] said. “But I can promise you one thing: in five years time you won’t remember a thing about me."
He was wrong of course. He remembered so much: his scent in the morning, the way he smiled at a badly timed joke, his face when he was focused—trying to solve a problem. He remembered the first joke he made to him, their first date, their final conversation. He remembered all of the bad things too. Anxiety and paranoia. An endless sensation of boredom and regret. He remembered yelling and laughing and mocking him, though why felt so distant from him now.
Maybe he was right. There were so many things he couldn’t remember now. The name of his father and mother, his first boyfriend’s name, the restaurant they visited in Miami. The last fight they had or the first or the one in the middle. He remembered the outlines of it but not the full figure. These things he thought he’d hold onto kept slipping from him. Water from an open hand. That’s how it went. Nothing one could do.