NORTH

from my post here on the couch across from you.

You can be sitting right in front of me.  Easy like that, just type type typing or staring blankly.  I’ll hear a sigh and like a shot I feel your absence.  Still, you’re right there.  You’re sitting right there in front of me, and yet I am anticipating it, I am feeling it, always.

How can I quantify less than before?  It’s as if you are vapor, sometimes heavier and all around me, but mostly just the soft kind that feels like a cobweb against my wrist or cheek or knee. 

I don’t know if you’re special—if this is special.  I can never recall what I felt at the onset with anyone else.  I can’t recall if it was all fabricated torture and longing, or if those things were really there—a record on a loop, coming back around to the same point of origin with merely a different face each and every time.  Does that make it less significant?  Does that make you less significant?  Or me? 

The one distinction I know of:  now.  You’re here now, and I am exactly this way, feeling these things, seeing what I see, right now. 

Sometimes it feels too easy.  Sometimes I think the resentment is already there and I know how this story goes and how it ends and what I will say and what I will do and how it will feel in a year.   Then there’s that sigh.  There is that weight lifting, that hole, that less than before, and all at once I know I have no idea at all.

You’re learning to see me.  I hear it when we’re lying in bed and you begin that series of blinks before folding your arms around me and making some impossible noise that could mean so many things.  I suppose that’s what I always wanted, and never expected to find so terrifying.  

It’s a burning realization—a crippling kind of satisfaction—understanding that for once there is nothing I would change about you.

fact or fiction or something very much in between.

I have hardly a cursory grasp on proper punctuation, but dammit if I’m not enthusiastic about its implementation.  

The following is an excellent example:

Later, as Samuel traversed the pothole ridden space between his side of the leaning and useless half-fence divided yard and Ada’s, he would recount the way he felt a little pang of something in the upper regions of his chest, near his shoulder—the way it spread into his throat and bubbled there like soft sea foam cresting the shore as he saw the backs of her legs, white, narrow and languid, retreating into the mirror image of his own home.  He felt like sleeping on the kitchen floor again.  He felt like putting all of his belongings back into his Bronco and heading to the airport or the docks or helipad or anything mobile and headed overseas.  Something about the backs of her knees—the weight of his senses—made him want to be somewhere arid, hot, and lying comatose. 

This image of light flittering around the cotton haze of her dress, the beads of sweat surely then imperceptible from his vantage point, but remembered all the same, was something Samuel would recall with frequency late in his life as he lay immobile—a man whose life never stopped being fully realized in its heavy premonitions—on an ancient box spring, sick and delusional with fever in a room burning with sun.

Hi.  I’m using this for self-involved blathering from here on out.  Less image-y, more word-y.  I’m sure all six of you are just pissing your pants about it.

- K