On Sleeping with a Human

The things I remember, I mean thoroughly recall; they are flashes of sights and sounds that shuffle like shaky movie frames, like dull light plunging headlong through diaphanous film reels.

They are the strange combinations of body chemistry or the succor of another person saliva, the sweet taste that her sweat leaves on my body. It is the rhythm of blood in my ears. It’s the texture of her breath on my neck or cheek, or the feeling of her eyes looking down my body over my shoulder blade.

Again, the memories are more of a stroboscopic rendition of my reality, pieced together with loose frames and poor lighting, sometimes missing a curve or with a hair out of place.

The pale lemon glow of her skin under the incandescent lighting. The stark hue that the human body takes when under lit, when on the fringe of good light and the envelope of darkness. The glow of flashed smiles and the subconscious covering of the body with movement and hunched shoulders.

All of these pieces have place, in the nonlinear crèche of the mind. In the perhaps bulbous entity of memory making and storing, the unkempt repository of old thoughts and passions, of untidy regrets and hopeless pursuits, all of these have their place. Though the strata may reveal unwieldy combinations and conscripted falls in personality, the faculties remain and waiting like a pervert in a snowstorm, drawing in all the bits he can with eyes closed, and when all is said and done opens his lids to think that he has changed the world. These are memories that border on precious and precipitous, that stutter between the curtains of fact and faux.

I try to write it down quickly, before I forget the minute details that have made the situation, and I hopelessly feel that with pedantic prose I can record the emotion and the environment to totality, so that if I am alone I can take another dose. So that if things were to change, I can grow and methodically piece together what remains, what can still be found growing in the pastures of distant history.

I could most certainly begin writing a Haiku for the simplest piece of her body, and how it inspires me. Something like her toes, or about the way her stomach folds when her jeans are too tight and she is bending down to retrieve her rumpled shirt.

I could try to sculpt in words, on how the air in our closed room carries a simple breed of dust, and how it in practice responds to the sunlight wafting in the high windows and speckles her cheek. I could draft out the somber song of many lonely mornings, waiting on a step, or looking at other people, knowing your doing the same, knowing I could be touching you.

That could be me in the bell tower, or in the park breeze. It could be you I see in the coffee shop with your nose wrinkled at the crossword puzzle and your teeth holding back the bag of crushed lavender tea. It could make one irrevocably frantic.

Images spliced, pieced together from the mounds they are clipped from. Tragedy embracing farce, tumbling this wheel into awkward jerky motions.