365

[Written 12 September 2016]

{1/3}

Like it was yesterday:

How it started with a traffice jam and ended with a red eye.

The late-afternoon light, a wash of misty grey.

Waiting, how hard it was to breathe.

The explosion in her chest to know he was real.

The colour blue.

His voice, caressing vowels and kneading consonants.

How the strength in his fingers made her dizzy.

The way her hip fit perfectly just below his when they walked side-by-side.

How light bloomed over his right shoulder as he leaned in to claim her mouth.

The colour blue.

Her smile as she watched him thunder under the lights, sending him a message he'd only read later.

How the balmy night air cooled the scorch rising off their skin.

The very particular song the maelstrom of hands and lips sang to one another.

The way they kissed goodbye and how she saw it from above, outside herself, dissociated from the pain.

The colour blue.

The indelible mark he made.

*****

{2/3}

How long is too long to remember? How long is too long to feel? How long is too long to treasure?

She doesn't know. 

The days passed seem like far too long and yet not nearly long enough. An unsolvable paradox. 

She couldn't keep it down if she tried.

So she lets it rise, that day. She lets it live again in colour and in sound.

She lets it come back to her.

*****

{3/3}

She observes that moment in time the best way she knows how: By giving. 

She gives because she wants him to know that she remembers. She gives because she wants him to know she'll never forget. She gives because she wants him to feel singular and hopes the magic will visit him one more time. She gives because she doesn't know how not to.

She feels mostly solitary in remembrance. She wraps herself in it anyway and walks through the day wearing it like prize. It is still enveloping her as she burrows into the night. She lets it cling because it was important to her. It had proved something was real, even if it was never to be.

As she slides into bed, bare skin stroked by cool sheets, she does the other thing she now can't remember not knowing how to do: She makes the bed quake imagining how they devour each other savagely and without mercy before curling together in a tender knot of aftermath. She binds herself in the affection of her own arms.  

A year feels round.

She turns off the light.