I was in love with this girl three years before we got together while she was dating someone else. We became best friends. Then she disappeared for years. When she reappeared, she quickly fell in love with me while I was dating someone else. The relationship with my someone else could have been good, but I was incapable of having any romantic relationship at that moment. So shortly after ending it, this girl walked back into my life and, well, what I needed was a friend because I didn’t have any. The relationship was just a part of the package I couldn’t refuse. Horrid an analogy as it is, getting into this relationship was like buying something you don’t need, but that’s on sale for dirt cheap, and rationalizing it by saying, “Well, I haven’t got a use for it at the moment, but if I want it later, I’ll feel like an idiot if I didn’t pick it up when I had the chance.”
You know the drill by this point—ten sentences.
Outside the wall of waist-high windows I’m under, there is a scabby-barked maple tree, and its neon green leaves—just larval balls last week, now unfurled and impossibly glossy—make a sound slightly louder than susurration in an April wind too brisk for us to believe the season is truly spring, but too halcyon for us to lie around the house as if we were still in the midst of a forbidding winter: In minutes, we’ve decreed, we will depart for a walk in the park once you have showered, shaved, and tied your hair in a braid. I jumped the gun, understanding “ready at one” to mean “ready at one,” thus I frustratedly resigned myself to wait a while, kickstarted the stereo, and collapsed on the couch in a queerly comfortable cross-armed prone pose that seems shaped by an undertaker, into an area suddenly smothered, upon my arrival, with a bright apricot sunlight so intense it feels gummy; it makes small stars of hovering dust and prevents me from getting up. Once settled, couch springs quiet and steady, immured by illumination and looking dead to the world, I sink into the semi-psychedelic soundscape of the song—now seemingly louder that you’ve stanched the flow of water in the shower—and listen to a mellow voice repeating the phrase, “Watch the weather change.”
I inhale and the air seeping in the windows is crisp, delicious, like cold fountain water to a dusty tongue, but the air rushing from the other direction—snaking down the hallway, around corners, under doors—is redolent of strawberries, açai, citrus, and soap (the smell of you, a smell I’m used to and fond of, the blended smell of your several shampoo routine) and these odors, rolling in on a contrail of humid fog from your shower, weigh it down, the air, make it heavy, lend it a sedative effect; this particular tincture during these specific seconds sends both body and mind reeling. Every breath is an event: My chest is elastic, sternum bends, ribs stretch to fit my lungs, which have become twenty-gallon greedy balloons capable of taking colossal amounts of outdoor air which runs my veins, tastes fresh, cool like aerosolized bloom, and after a few, I begin to effloresce; clean-blooded, my body, now gossamer, begins to drift with the wind, lifting ever-so-slightly from the sofa into that gummy sunlight, into the galaxy of hovering dust where I myself begin to glow; but with every breath also comes from the other direction the heavier scent of you: complexly textured, air that feels effervescent, that tickles my throat like the drupelets on a berry, satisfying as sucking warm smoke and, once accumulated, coming to eventual rest in my belly as an anchor, like the first bite of a rare steak—on this balmy April day every breath is exciting as an unwrapped Christmas gift for a six-year-old and the respiration has rendered me diaphanous, liable to sublimate or float away, and the smell of your hair is all that’s keeping me from becoming unmoored, from disappearing completely.
Once, weeks earlier, you berated me in bed for my obnoxious alarms, rankled and flummoxed by my insistence on hitting several snooze buttons for two hours instead of just setting the contemptible contraptions for a few hours later, and I replied to you that those hours wiled away in nine-minute increments were unquestionably the best of every day, because I was awake enough to know that I was asleep—”Sleep,” I’d said, “is squandered on the unconscious”—but I think my explanation stung, felt to you accusative, like I was implying that my hours with you were an inferior stretch; you said to me over breakfast that day, “I wish I could be that for you,” but by the time I’d put it together (your rejoinder was, in its moment, apropos of nothing, taking place more than an hour after the conversation proper) and assembled what you meant, it seemed too late to try and reassure you.
Half-slipped into slumber, the strange sepia tone seeping through the thin skin of my eyelids registers as an expelled fluorescence, a glow showing through from the inside, and the heat of the sun, which paints my face, my hands, my jeans, seems like more of the same—something coming from the inside; I am fading fast, sinking into the sensation, maybe more comfortable than I have ever in my life been, but still worried that soon I will lose the feeling (glory? joy?), and so I cling to the sugared perfume of your damp hair: like an upside down Rapunzel, I am tied by the bouquet of your braid to your finger and hover above like a kite, and I pray for you to keep rescuing me from black sleep. When the smell intensifies and the warped floor creaks, I know that you have entered the room; I hear your feet creep closer, crushing the stiff nap of new, vacuumed carpet, but you stop a short distance from me—curious, perhaps, or respectful of my apparent trance—and only whisper my name, an invitation to which I do not reply though you wait patiently; then I hear the crackle of your asthmatic sigh, a single step, the groan of old leather shoes, and a tinkling of keys, which means you have shifted into a hand-on-hip position expressing exasperation; you try it one more time, you say my name and find me still silent, but you surprise me because then, instead of storming away, I hear you step closer, slip off your shoes, and delicately set yourself down next to me.
The kiss on my cheek is the gentlest you have ever given—you are aggressive with your lips—and your phrasing is strange when you say what you say, when you say, facing me, “I want you to know that I am in love with you”; I can feel your breath in my ear when you make your stark declaration, a weirdly serious statement, strange because for months we have exchanged the words many times every day; if it weren’t for the fact that I asked you later in the afternoon if you’d said such a thing (and you admitted to it—every bit, from twice saying my name, to putting a fist to your hip, to slipping your shoes, settling in, giving a kiss, and pledging your sentiments), I would have assumed that I’d lost my grip on you and drifted into dream. I’d like to reply in kind, but I don’t and am instead selfish, choosing to savor my seconds in this liminal window: aglow, afloat, warmed by the syrup-thick light of the sun and cooled by the breeze—the fine hairs on my skin tremble in the wind that makes the maple tree whisper, as its neon leaves filter the pale lemon sun to somehow leave me battered in apricot—not a neuron in my body aches, not even my ground-down knees, and my brain is not weighted by that malaise which makes it feel to me that its rugose cortices are built of Lego bricks (sometimes depression registers as corners in the head or heart); I am, for all intents and purposes asleep, but able to appreciate it because of you, keeping me home with your citrus and strawberry aroma; you take my top hand and enlace your fingers, and for about an hour, you lay awake with me, as I amble in the paradise of unsleep perhaps not being so selfish after all, but merely accepting a gift I can’t begin to guess how you could have arranged.
