Mexico Journal: June 29, 2010

"For excuse, for our being together, we sit at the typewriter, pretending a necessary collaboration. He has a book to be typed, but the words I try to force out die on the air and dissolve into kisses whose chemicals are even more deadly if undelivered." (p. 25, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Elizabeth Smart)

I read these words and the story tears through me, a mortal wound that threatens to leap forth and make itself known in any moment. Those are the times, when the landscape races across my eyes, endlessly changing, violently static. He is with me, under my skin even when I promise myself a measure of respite. Microscopic molecules of his essence ooze from my writing hands and thinking mind as if sweat from my pores when my equine body pushes against the universe.

The scrape of his late afternoon chin against my soft flesh, the bruises that stay for days, physical reminders of his real existence and of my abject devotion to impossibility. There is no breath that doesn't gasp for him, no drowsiness that isn't ripped open to pour into the ever expanding abyss.

And I stand naked, vulnerable at the edge of his cliffs, the peaks and valleys under his feet spread forth offering if not comfort, at least a shared solitude. I am out past the edge of the sea. His island of peace, his ocean of tenderness. And I acquiesce. I will do his bidding, I will hold my tongue forever. I will not protest. I will not create life because it cannot be without his seed.

The thick foliage of my Eastern summers, the soft rains of the city, the oppressive heat. They converge on me as ravens. My body lays open. I smile and wave. The wind embraces the dried eucalyptus leaves and they are all him, pulverized, coursing through the air in tiny particles. I watch him disappear, sand through my fingers. Tactile and yet ungraspable.

We look at each other, as if we understand. And then his door slams shut behind him. Wheels kick up dust as they ride off together and I stand wavering on the edge of my very own demise, the ocean crashes on its rocky shore.