A Polaroid of Wishful Thinking

So here we are and all things blow up into one another on a lazy afternoon or a late evening, all comfortable with a small chill in the air. It’s the first time, maybe the second, quite possibly the third when we know a bit more about how to work one another. It may start off slow, but then again, it may not. We may be tender and curious like impending lovers, or at one another like wild animals. Regardless, only good things come of it, and we are a knot, a mess, a crumbling tower that may start out up against the wall, or in the middle of the room, but the gravity overwhelms, the desire for angles that aren’t all that easy to achieve while upright, so we tumble, collapse, reinvent geometry and take nothing for granted. Hands explore, eyes hone into eyes, lips are put to use, legs are like prehensile tails, holding on, repositioning, and life becomes a blur, yet highly focused at the same time. Outlines become targets to aim for. Arms—soft yet strong—around torsos, waists. Hands pulling, grazing, swirling, and prodding.

And it goes on until an unspoken agreement falls from the sky, we pull back, smile, blush, catch our breath. Someone needs to go to the bathroom, or get a glass of water, or maybe a walk in the fresh air is in order and now where are my boxers? Digging through the destruction of passion (the room was clean and tidy before this all started). At the foot of the bed, somehow tied in a double Windsor around the cast-off sheet, down at the left side where the corner of the fitted sheet popped off, exposing a faded, pillow-topped mattress that has seen this all before and will no doubt see it many times more. Standing up, equilibrium a little off, we try to dress, one leg in your pants, or one leg in my pants, and the other comes up and wraps arms around, interrupting the dressing process, lips lace together, tongues say things like “Don’t go” and “Come back soon” and “Do that again” and “I’ll meet you back here in 15 minutes,” all wet and warm and comforting, an anchor to a place that we all want to stay rooted in forever, however unreasonable that may be.

“No, I haven’t seen your sock. Just get some others, I’m sure it’ll show up” as we regard the explosion of a comforter, a sheet, a few pillows, that fitted sheet that wouldn’t stay on even if we were just sleeping peacefully in one another’s arms. Here’s your shirt, or mine, and I hand it to you with a grin or you hand it to me with a grin and grab my hand and pull me to you again, or I just go to you as you try to put on your shirt and there is more to say, with no words necessary. Sly smiles, fingertips drug down the length of a soft arm and I sit to tie my shoes and admire your shapes, your outlines, the soft edges that define you, that make you something I want to hold.

And we are outside, still didn’t find that sock, and there is a chill in the air, and we meander a few blocks in no particular direction, filling our lungs with the air, both secretly glad that the night is turning cold as that guarantees the need for body heat later on, the longing for 5-15 hours of constant spooning.

After not too long you shiver, or I do, and you notice, or I do, and suggest we head back, and we do, our pace only slightly faster because really we just want to get back to one another, and we do, after a glass of water, a comment on the cold, a dig through the junk mail on the counter, then still under the guise of innocence we are back in the bedroom and “Geez, it’s cold. Wanna spoon?” and we try to put the bed back together, there’s your sock, somehow on the far side of the room. How did that happen?

And spoon we do, but hands, as they are wont to do, begin to roam, bodies press into bodies, and once again and forever more, a special forever that doesn’t conform to the old definition of forever, we explore one another until breaths quicken, then fade, then off to sleep as one of us stays awake a little bit longer than the other, watching sleep happen, the relaxed face, the gentle breathing, and I nuzzle the back of your neck, or you nuzzle mine, and plant a soft kiss, prompting you, or me, to turn and hold, mumbling soft nonsense and you are back asleep, or I am, but if it is you then I lay there, marveling, waiting for the universe to start laughing as this must be some epic, cosmic joke that some beautiful creature would fall asleep in my arms like this; that the past few hours were merely a crude prank to shatter my heart.

But it isn’t, and we are here, and I silence the shitty voice that never expects that I deserve these things, and I kiss you on the forehead, and breathe in gently the baby-like air of the breath that comes out of your nose, and for now I can be quite sure that people who claim that nothing is perfect are sad souls, and utterly wrong in every sense of the word.