She kneels over him.
Here many times before; starting to feel like unknown territory.
The unfamiliarity so needed.
The light is such that she can’t quite see his eyes. If there were more light, she wonders. He is there in complete peace. A quiet ocean depth that holds its tempest above. A million miles can be traveled in a moment and she goes there and back.
She has walked most the way through life with a holographic appearance of certainty and destination. Decisions come easily as, really never are there hard ones. Her fire-lit belly longs over and over for a day that involves just one hard one rather than the parade of mediocre constantly presented. So, here, both he and she often fall mistakenly into the lull that she is the same. Not interested in the delicate or suggested. Not meek.
Trouble is, this is the armory.
Tonight, she wants to wipe it all blank and start again. To pluck the dead buds, leach out the poison, to blood let. How frustrating the path that leads to the writer’s sharpened tongue also the one that restrains arms and bodies from the intimate. To feel hands for the first time; rough and warm and firm. To feel lips for the first time, tentatively asking. To be inhabited as a holy land. And to believe in that land. To do all of this completely bare; new skin breathing free from the armor pieces previously locked in place. No sense of wondering if the hands that land on it will be marveled or not.
So she stares harder. The clouds move slowly. Wind blows through the window and the moon’s light enters instructively into the room. Eyes are seen. He knows all of this and more still, and just lies in wait. And what she has been so worried about happens; she cries. She can’t stop. Her hair falls in her face and sticks to her cheek. Her hands brace her panting chest on his. She can’t believe it happened, she can’t believe it keeps her still, she wants anger and strength, and fiercely hates that she knows that means surrender. Tonight. Another million miles crossed.
She bends down. His hands find that sacred no man’s land. She rests her forehead on his and asks someone, anyone, to lead her the rest of the way.
Photo by Fezbot2000 on Unsplash