I wake up and the sun has set. I dreamt of touching you. My fingertips across your cheekbones that I have sketched a hundred thousand times, that I have painted once (or twice). Your eyes were closed. You were so still and I was breathless, lips parted, but unable to speak. No part of us was touching except for fingertips to face, soft, slow, careful... like touching the first flower petals of spring. And not the flowers in the stores or potted for table tops. Like the petals I cannot stop myself from stroking in the fine arboretums. The orchids. The lilies. The colors of passion beneath my hands that always remind me of you.
Day has given way to night and though we joke that you are allied with the sun, it is now – as shadows congregate into their own denomination, as they rally toward their crusade of midnight – that is our time. The phone has stopped ringing. The ambient noise of my neighbors is gone. Even LA traffic seems less by the time the clock reads ours. The world is hushed by our silent laughter. My focus narrows until everything else falls away... dissolves into less-than the reality we have together. I’ll distract you, tell you to place your palm over my heart, to feel how it pounds, a vibration like battle through your bones. I’ll distract you so you don’t sense the deep hot blush that spreads over my cheeks. Only speed -- the sheer power of riding, taming, controlling a machine too big for my frame – only speed makes me feel the way you do, and lately it has paled in comparison. (Hm. And the rest of this analogy isn’t PG 13, so I’ll skip it, baby. But you know what I mean.)
Call me melodramatic. Call me silly. Call me anything, baby, as long as the sun has set, sunk down on gossamer wings, washing the sky in yellow, purple and pink along the big city horizon. Make my substantial, fulfilling, hard-working, rewarding, hard-playing day and strip it away. Wipe it from my memory as insignificant and base, mundane and without meaning. Lift it off me, peal it back. Find me. Just me. Then open your eyes and look at me. Now I see you.
Somewhere in the apartment, a clock is ticking. With my head turned, resting on the arm of the couch, it seems like it could be a wrist watch. But I wear the same leather cuffs I don in pixels, plus a fine gold bracelet from Solin, long ago. No watch. No time holds me here. New days come with dawn, not the slender hands of a clock. My only time piece is a skeleton face pocket watch and it’s laying on the bathroom floor with my chaps and jeans and boots. I’m just passing tick-tocks, chillin’ in Pokemon boxers and my “Biker Chick” tee. Wondering where the clock is. Wondering if it’s a Celestial clock, ticking toward some nonlinear event that will rock my world the way you do.
I stare at the ceiling. I imagine I see angels. I turn on my back and lace my fingers behind my head. I think about chocolate. Then about tropical fish. I wonder if I should trade Mom’s Prius and my Z1000 for something bigger/faster/redder. I wonder if anyone can be calm without Christ.
I realize that fonts are very seductive. Or words. How language can become a touch. How poetry and prose can redeem us. I like fonts because they are the smexy clothes wrapped around words. The flashy, evocative, first impressions. Before I know what you’re saying, I know how it looks. And I love how the web defaults so much text to Georgia and Times and Arial... forcing us to get better, get real, get smart, because, goodness knows, those fonts say nothing. They lay words nude. They reveal everything without candy coating. They demand the poetic and the absurd, the intelligent and provocative, to be laid bare in the text itself. A living testament to how a mind works.
“Abide with me; 'tis eventide.
The day is past and gone;
The shadows of the evening fall;
The night is coming on.
Within my heart a welcome guest,
Within my home abide.
O Savior, stay this night with me;
Behold, 'tis eventide.
“Abide with me; 'tis eventide,
And lone will be the night
If I cannot commune with thee,
Nor find in thee my light.
The darkness of the world, I fear,
Would in my home abide.
O Savior, stay this night with me;
Behold, 'tis eventide.
“Abide with me; 'tis eventide.
Thy walk today with me
Has made my heart within me burn,
As I communed with thee.
Thy earnest words have filled my soul
And kept me near thy side.
O Savior, stay this night with me;
Behold, 'tis eventide.”
When you write to me, in your refusal to shorthand, txtspk, I am lost in you. No, *found* in you, with you, by your words. I am showered in beautiful strokes of phrase and subtlety of meaning. What you share with me is never washed away by anything else. It is multilayered... *dimensions* of definition. Your full messages become single glyphs, writ across my mask. Let the world see them! What can the world comprehend, after all?
In five words or less, how many different ways do you make me blush, speed my heart, turn me on, give me chills, inspire me to know only you? In five words or less, how many different ways do you make me laugh, capture my attention, engage my mind, tug at my spirit, demand that I am yours alone? How many are scripture? How many are in French? How many are time-stamped? How many ways? A dozen... a hundred... how long is a novel? 50,000 words. Divided by five: 10,000 ways. Hm. Sounds right. It has to be. You know my intolerance of the inarticulate is legendary ;)
E.J.
