Intimacy

Is it a crime that I liked you for the collapsing breadth of your lips? I
keep wondering if my life would have been different had I arrived at
the party ten minutes later or had you worn a different shade of
lipstick. The point is – isn’t it damning evidence that life’s
fundamental joy is interstitial? That most of the beauty lies between
moments of beauty themselves, cobbled invisibly on roads of tar,
careening around corners – a sharp turn here, a tender touch there.
What happens beneath the sheets of redundancy is accumulation. Of
taste, smell, sight building Manhattans and Jenga kingdoms. Those
must collapse for their own good. Glory and awry are intermeshing
synonyms for RNA and DNA anyways. It really is fine if you don’t
want to engage in meaningful conversation, my darling. We can fill
the crannies with silence or some Simon and Garfunkel. Your call. But
I would really like it if you would take charge and send out my funeral
invitations were I now to fall headfirst and burn through this floor of
lava into red earth and ache. No no, I’m not being morbid – it’s just
that I find the finality of death to be a magnificent reminder to love.
Now we’re swinging in hammocks on the balcony of our lives. Now
we’re kissing so that the day takes longer to pass. I’m so tired of wit
and aphorisms – despite their prodigal promise, they are now failing at
intimacy. Even language, my Bucephalus is letting me down. The
journey of wear and tear is such. And I know just like your laugh, the
sound of the dentist’s drill tonight will grow shriller with my every
palpitation and simultaneously while I crave for the comfort of hotel
rooms – their coverlets, moisturizers, shower caps and a love that
springs from navels and wrists on light floral bed sheets, it will lull me
to sleep.