[Untitled] I'm not entirely sure what this is.

(Other than three hours of lonely-like ponderous imaginings and Death Cab For Cutie.)

~

     She was standing before the window, shuttered though it was, when his knock came on her door.
     There were stars in the sky, turning their faraway faces towards them as she opened her house to the road.  His silhouette was dark as his hair, and as sleek.  He crossed her floor on heavy but light feet—soon she would call it a widow's walk, and some unspecified time after that it would be forgotten.
     Together they smelled of sand—of shifting foundations made for dancing and stumbling feet, of fragile castles soon worn away, of fanciful dreams soon washed out by high tide.  Heat still flushed visibly across them, in sunkissed streaks of ochre and thickly forested freckles.  Eyes were damp, with perspiration too warm to dissolve into the air, and perhaps with the visceral knowledge of all they must forego.
     They faced each other; they slowly grasped one another close for a long, last moment:  imbibing the scent, the feel; patterning their memories with the texture of their summer.  Breath was their song now—long and heavy, as if they lay on the verge of sleep.  It was a final closeness, and they reveled and sorrowed in it as one.
     Carefully, then, they began their work.  They sat in the near-darkness, set their hands on shoulders first.  Sometimes their own, sometime one another, perforating and folding, loosening and disencumbering.  If they exchanged words, they were so quiet as to be nearly indiscernible; they may have meant everything, or nothing at all, in this static hour of reality warped by transition.
     They stripped all memories of one another from their corporeal selves, the laughter and joyful energy slipping off of them as rain from a waterfowl's wings.  Their limbs slowed and steadied, the hot aroma of sunlight settling on them in new earthy tones, pinioning them into regularity and necessity.  It flaked off them, it peeled off them; every once in a while it would bubble and crack, and the wisps of heat would escape, unwanted, into the night.
     What else escaped with it?  They did not dare to ask, lest some unnameable beast pounce on their doubts from within.  Everything they was "they" was shivered off with fingers sometimes tearing, sometimes stroking.
     Time had followed close on their heels, as it followed in every Season.
     After an hour, they stood, dressed in burnished, tender pink, looking pale and rosy against the sloughed-off image of their yellow-red-brown summer skin.  The dim firelight cast reflections of their new incarnations, the selves they now belonged within.  Their feet set comfortably against the floor, flat-footed instead of tip-toed.
     They were always told not the anticipate the emptiness of the Autumn.  They were always cautioned not to look into the eyes of the encroaching twilight until they were on its verge—always warned that to cast a shadow over the Summer, over the noon, was agony and sacrilege.
     Why was it sacrilege to ache?  She wondered it aloud.
     He had no answer, and their new skin was too tender for him to reach for her hand.  She knew by the bent of his head that he shared her mind in part, that he might yet share it beyond this night, even if she knew nothing of it, even if he understood it not himself, even after no trace remained of "they" even in dreams.
     How long would it take until they forgot?  —It was a cycle that did not end.  Better for them to enjoy the moment while they were within its brilliant, dazzling, exhilarating embrace, and take the grief when it fell like they were human anvils.  it would be over soon enough.—   She could not even recall if there had been anyone before, if summer existed more than once in a lifetime.
     But why was it sacrilege to ache?
     —Had she ever asked this question before?—
     The light that burns at the heart of summer—it is to know, and to risk one's heart anyway.  Never mind that it chafed, never mind that the glasspaper would sear it from her eventually.  Let the smell of sand linger, even mingled with the smell of salt for a time.
    Let her feel the end coming, and love despite it.  Let her strength be for something even just for a blink of an eye:  a splash of dark, cool color burning across the ever-gold sky.
     No.  The thought to reject it, for a moment, passed through her, but it was swiftly gone, ephemeral in the hard-nosed wave of tradition and habit and the entropy of the world that already overtook them in the face of the change.
     Long minutes he and she sat in the dark, staring into eyes that had sooner been portals for the world, for the microcosm of a soul, and now were slowly draining of their intimate double edge.
     If the love lodged somewhere within them, they would not know it until the end of all things.
     At last he and she slept, and when morning came, her winter skin was firm enough that she could go about her day, and there were only tiny shavings of freckles and snippets of gold on the floor, already falling through the minute cracks in the wood grain, to show that he had ever been.

~

17 March 2012