Summer

Daybreak. Pale rays of light cleave (your) consciousness into humid halves. Edges start to blur. A book of poetry, sprawled on your left thigh, disappears as your lids finally drop.

Slumber and desire are both fluid--

The ceiling, dock to your longing: this will be your first thought when you open your eyes again, hours later. Oh, merciless heat. When and where, deliverance? A dull ache lingers as a montage of tarnished dreams dissipates from your mind, but

--so let me flow--

not yet. Meanwhile, your mind roams in unbearable brightness, through tepid skin and agitated hands, above rising, and rising heights, underneath the glow of distant moonlight and alongside a frugal, sultry breeze, through restlessness and crawling mist. A dark, nameless hunger, an absent stasis. The eyes seek dim corners, entanglements. Blue lights flit about.

A specter of you, faceless, all brilliance--

On surfaces, sweat breaks, and breaks, and breaks into tiny, oppressive beads and

you dream of skies unfastening,

of you, opening

of rain falling on parched ground, of you catching the drops finally, finally, with your

tongue.

Interlude

Mo chuisle, you have come back.

Rest now, dear heart. Rain has laced the evening with crystal drops; look at how they shimmer in the moonlight. The night has shed away its mournfulness, and is once more fragrant with promise.

Do not keep this brightening at bay; let yourself be consumed by its radiance.

Tomorrow's sunlight waits. Love hovers at your fingertips.

Debris

Slanted stems of sunlight bathe the room in the aftermaths of a stowaway morning, and my eyes catch movement, elsewhere. Elsewheres are faraway places. A quick brush, an agitation of sorts, the noiseless rustle of absence. One more hand slices into the stillness and I realize it is the mirror, stirring: the mirror is the explanation, and my hand is in it. There doesn't always have to be a reason. I look, and my elbow materializes.

That is my wrist, and that is my hand. The sunlight lingers, waiting. My fingers are flipping through the pages of a slim volume; my fingers are looking for a memory. There is no face, and I move away, grateful. You will only find that which you really look for. The air hangs heavy with what comes next. And I'm sorry, but there are no more gaps I can put you in. 

Hand and book disappear, reappear, and I scoop them out of the mirror.

Somewhere, mute, small and distant, a misplaced hollowness. Here, the poem I was looking for.

Your Franz Ferdinand Shirt

And indeed, there will be time...

There will be time, there will be time.

- from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot

A girl and a boy once roamed the city under sun and starlight. Their portion of the years, once swallowed by the city, are now resurfacing into a single moment. Once upon a time, the girl and the boy drifted into parallels and disappeared into the years. But some sleight of hand, hosts of cogent thoughts, some vagrant wish, a strange, mute sadness--they will never know which, or that even all of these--have driven the years away and pulled, tilted them into a single point.

The girl and the boy are now talking about a shirt. The girl is telling the boy about her dream, because the shirt--and the boy--were in it. They are laughing, and in their laughter, their thoughts are careening backward into another time. The boy is remembering a Thursday, the girl, a Saturday. They were both in those days. As they talk, they are thinking of each other, and they are bending back into each other. Now, they are starting to grope around for the lost years, inching their way into them, picking up the luminous fragments and handling them in a circumspect way, avoiding the cracks on the floor, kicking the shards away. 

In this moment, they are not aware that the wounds have healed, or that they were ever there. They are not thinking about healed wounds; they are not thinking about wounds, at all. They are asking each other about the last movie they saw, about the books they have read. The boy is telling the girl about the book he finished two days ago; about how, upon shutting it, he had found himself wishing he were also shutting her memory forever, because the years have failed to do that. "But here I am," the girl says, and the boy replies, "no you're not here. You're there, I'm here. And I want to be there." The girl hesitates, then laughs, and the boy does, too. They are walking around the gaps.

They start talking about something else.

Grace

She caught her by the wrist and said, "Your wings are bleeding."

Startled, Czarina slowed her steps down and looked beyond her right shoulder. All she saw were sunlight, some trees, the sidewalk, a lamp post, and a man, sitting on a bench, reading a book. She stopped and stood where she was, staring at her right wrist where the woman had touched her, remembering the distinct whiff of cold air that seemed to have brushed past her when she was touched. The woman. It was a woman's voice she had heard, and the words had been spoken in an unmistakably feminine way.

She felt her heartbeat start to slow down; it had accelerated to an alarming pace two, three minutes ago. She walked to a nearby bench and sat down, finding relief in the familiarity of wood. Your wings are bleeding.

She gingerly touched her right shoulder blade with her left hand and winced a little. It still felt sore, and she could picture flowers blooming on it. Some were purple, others, bright red. Rudy. He had planted the blooms on her skin; he had imprinted himself on her consciousness for always. She had cowered and cried, remembering other pains and hearing other insults, feeling them again, hearing them again.

She thought it would never end, and she was right. Bathed in daylight and so many hours removed from that evening, she knew that it was still happening. Her heart, she felt, was still breaking; her soul, bleeding. She wiped the tears on her cheeks with the back of her right hand and made a decision. She was going to look for a new place.

She stood up and started walking down the path, thinking of angels and dreaming of flight.

Here is your line.

He sank into the couch like an old friend and lit a cigarette. His pockets were full of unused scripts, obscure facts, and cryptic notes; most of them, hoarded from walls and pavements, a few, borrowed from random years, none of them useful, except when it really mattered, none of them hollow, except where the edges began. He watched the smoke float aimlessly in the space between him and the cream-painted wall, like a nameless shadow looking for a place to go, looking for a parallel to press itself against, and he wondered at these thoughts; he knew they didn't make sense.

Outside, the darkness lingered like wine in a glass.

She threw her head back, laughing at something he had said, and she felt the space between them turn into undulating rings, becoming smaller, and smaller, and smaller. And in her mind, she was thinking, will there ever be a question I can throw at you that you cannot answer?

"Probably not," he said.

"What?" She blinked, twice, wondering if she had asked the question out loud. She was sure she had not.

"Forget it," he grinned. "Are you somewhere else, again?"

"No," she shook her head. "I'm right here."

They started talking about The Beatles and as she listened to him speak, she remembered other conversations in other places, other days, another year. It occurred to her that they had both become different people, but then, afterwards, wondered if they had stayed the same, all along. She was a lost child who had insisted on clutching at the same straws, and in one way or another, she would turn to him for answers to questions, for when nights got too dark and things that were lost became irretrievable, blackened out.

She had a tendency to slip away; he was a drifter who knew his way about, and always found his way back. She was liquid; he was the breeze. She felt like he could see through her, somehow, could read between her confused billows. She constantly found herself struggling against waves and waves of untold stories, in storms both real and imagined, in self-made whirlpools, in conjured images of drowning, in nightmares of frighteningly high tides. And she would always come back up, gasping for air.

Conversations with him were balms to her many wounds, and listening to him talk, she realized that it was really she who had dreamed up the unused scripts, the obscure facts, the cryptic notes. It was really she who looked at the smoke for more than what it was. It was she whose thoughts were looking for a place to go, it was she who was looking for parallels, and she knew that these thoughts didn't make sense, at all.

Not yet.

Meanwhile, they talked about Beethoven.

Segment

A door in the mind closes, its sound barely perceptible. It may never leave an imprint in the memory, may never be heard, may never be felt. But in some random series of seconds, when the mind is at the crest of wakefulness, it comes back, that previously unnoticed wafting of a slight breeze, that faint click of the knob.