Between Knowing and Feeling
Wherein I am an inclusion in your scruff...
Between Knowing and Feeling
Scrolling through becomes too long, checking too much to live, last night, a lover was feeling overwhelmed with medicine.
I took the understanding and compromised. I invite them into the bathroom with me.
Long after I lit a candle, after I lowered the lid, and I sat them on the toilet. For a while after I left them with a bottle of water I have them help me lower to the floor so something in them knows where water is. And I step out, and wait, a beat and come back, with blanket and plush.
I point out the circle.
Looking up, they follow my gaze to the ceiling. The bathroom is warm. Quiet air in the radiating ceiling and small space. Frosted window cuts down the neighboring streetlight cypress can only do an ancient much to black out. I become told I am pretty in candlelight.
We share ours; years in memory. Have your own with me, for approximate:
"What's safe?"
This is my response to a therapist funded by the school. The therapist asks me, "are you safe?" Their face becomes something else. Or the conversation turns. What ripened fell. We find thing we can pick together. How are shoulders (would they be lower were it up to them). Exact phrasing doesn't survive, save the question.
Lover laughing - having glanced the circle, it becomes the opalescent clitoris. A vibrating, dancing lens projecting against mouth into sensation. From lip of jar spills candlelight. A circle into memories tidepool. We every laugh. A moment becomes twenty for two sixty.
We giggle, talk, too sexy, more. Words fall from us like sentence. Don't remember where to end. One statement begins the next. Gets religious. Spurts of spirituality taken photosynthetic, held. We leave the bathroom.
We step out, release candle smoke. Candle turning rightside up, molecules empty. Perform inevitability transformation leaves light to take. One way of reading a situation gives way to another.
We clean, keeping cleanliness scruffy, art. And otherwise disparaging; look around. Do I collage right? My metaphors serve ones greater still, as conversation expands, same as everything, a thought of food follows the object of desire outliving its metaphor to form shared story.
Not here long, or elsewhere much. Earth, prissy planet. Not ruggedly martian, minimalist in maelstrom. Nor ample venutian, maximalist in climate. Practically overprecise, forgetting it's detritus. Disc of solar leftovers, exactling self.
disambiguating (Erosion + accretion) = story .
Interpretation: losing finds ourselves each other - whatever that let mean this moment.
No wrong answer. (Yours is mine.)
Should you find yourself on a toilet in the dark, perhaps the next candle lit can be my lighting. Maybe set a cup of water down to find it let this story my hand be guide you. May you look up, let trembling circle above you be mouth, mine. More than feelings,
These.