Sex
(18+)
It is hard to make this choice when the room is so small and bright, and the outside big and deep. But I have not taught myself to lie on the earth and feel how much greater it is than me. And I can’t help following the sky with my eyes as it moves past me, and I can’t help closing my eyes to imagine the boat that carries me to the middle of a lake as dark as the gaps between the clouds. I forget everything I have learned about how to hold myself at the last edges of sensation when not so long ago I held the small hands of a child and taught her to play a clapping game, when I stood before a storm of scalding water that would have killed me if I gave it the mistake it looked for. After all this time, we still must love and eat, and none of us is alone. See why I create these places where I am a stone. In the bed, soft against the side where I make the dark blanket more beautiful and the sheet a pale and magnificent drawing, there is nowhere to wrap the part of myself that understands the handshake of joy in my arms and hold her while she cries. The sink is running in the next room and the walls are flashed with what the world does at night. Too much of us is evident in this hour and I am sick with a cold fever that hasn’t broken since I was a girl who loved how good it was to sleep on the floor, so near to the silent ground. Still, the boat, and the dark water that has its private depth. It never tries to carry me anywhere. It makes the wind wait in the trees.
It is hard to make this choice when the room is so small and bright, and the outside big and deep. But I have not taught myself to lie on the earth and feel how much greater it is than me. And I can’t help following the sky with my eyes as it moves past me, and I can’t help closing my eyes to imagine the boat that carries me to the middle of a lake as dark as the gaps between the clouds. I forget everything I have learned about how to hold myself at the last edges of sensation when not so long ago I held the small hands of a child and taught her to play a clapping game, when I stood before a storm of scalding water that would have killed me if I gave it the mistake it looked for. After all this time, we still must love and eat, and none of us is alone. See why I create these places where I am a stone. In the bed, soft against the side where I make the dark blanket more beautiful and the sheet a pale and magnificent drawing, there is nowhere to wrap the part of myself that understands the handshake of joy in my arms and hold her while she cries. The sink is running in the next room and the walls are flashed with what the world does at night. Too much of us is evident in this hour and I am sick with a cold fever that hasn’t broken since I was a girl who loved how good it was to sleep on the floor, so near to the silent ground. Still, the boat, and the dark water that has its private depth. It never tries to carry me anywhere. It makes the wind wait in the trees.
2020-01-26 20:44:04
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