There were no fireworks when I kissed her on the lips. My upper over her upper, her lower under my lower, not contacting against one another, not the parallel pairs of a gentleman and lady hiding libidinous intent; rather interlocking inside one another, leaves of flesh discretely impassioned, forging with courage into faithful ambiguity, not afraid, never afraid. I drove her home as Bill picked out his soul on white and black keys. There are no grey piano keys.
I didn’t think you’d be home. I had to ask anyway.
And here I am.
I told you, you’ve been in my dreams.
You’ve been in mine. This is our connection, our clairvoyance. We have to only use our powers for good.
Only good?
Yeah.
Maybe a little bad?
Maybe a little.
We’ll see.
Depending on the circumstances. Not every moral decision is black and white. There is a sizable grey area.
Plenty of grey area.
Yes.
I wanted to say: We’re talking about sex now, aren’t we? I held it back. Despite recent and numerous occasions of confidence and noble disregard for the whims and emotions of those around me I could not quite bring myself into a dominating relationship with my words, or with her life, or with her body. I could never do that. She’s tough, and tougher than last I saw her. But still so tender in my eyes. It’s not a chauvinist thing, it’s only how I see her, how I will always see her.
Eyes have always been the locus of my gravitation toward women. Or at least, they become the visual expression of everything I find attractive in a woman. And hers are too soft, when they look into me—when her gaze washes over me, and her gaze is like a spring shower in the night, or at least a waterfall at dusk, something liquid certainly, sometimes acid rain, I’ve seen that too—her eyes are too soft for me to not attribute that softness to an innate inner beauty that only I can see. If that beauty is in my eye and not hers as some would have it, so be it: her most secret beauty belongs only to me. I will store it in a box of stained oak, carved with elaborate boyhood mythologies in lines just as dark and deep as those carved in my memory, and each time I open that unholy treasure vault my chest will fill with the scent of warm flesh, sweat sprouting from her arching back, four-leaf clovers, dogs, forests, flowers, and every kind of smoke.
In the attic? No, never in the attic. The basement? For a few years. But when my courage flourishes again I’ll burry the box in the middle of a field, and as the horses watch from the hillside—bemused, unfamiliar with their own elusive beauty as they splash their nebulous silhouettes against the orange moonlight under a cloud in the shape of a dragon-head or a flying machine or a church on fire—I’ll cover the box in rich soil from the moist forest floor, and plant an apple tree deep in the mound of earth, so that when invisible creatures have turned my past into sweet-smelling carnage, a young man may prance barefoot along a farm road fifty years from now and taste the sugar of youth, and my spirit will dance in the juice that drips from his chin, and he will give himself—without a thought to consequence, reason, decency, horror—to a beautiful young woman who lives on the hillside just within walking distance, who loves to hop fences and lay in the grass and sing to the stars as they spin themselves into dizzy insanity. The lion pounces on the scorpion, the hunter pursues the lion, the serpent unhinges its jaw to swallow the hunter.
Chaos feeds chaos in the heavens above. The distant spheres of fusion that determine our fates will play at war until the universe is white-hot froth. When that day comes, when the fire burns us alive, you and I alone will recognize the taste.