I lay next to you. No: not next to, entangled with. No: not entangled, braided. No: there are no prepositions that fit our configuration. We lay swaddled in the soft cotton of bedsheets; our arms and legs akimbo, your thinner limbs weaving in and through the acute angles of my bent elbows and knees. In the scant cerulean of a full-moon’s glow through curtains, we are pale blue like the shoreline waters of the tropical sea. It is impossible to tell by sight which pieces belong to whom.
Our earlier hurried breaths—a staggered, rhythmic duet—eventually gave way to laughter. We always manage to laugh after making love (though other evenings we are instead hungry after fucking). Tonight, the hiccups of our chuckling gave way, finally, to a deep sigh that you released and I seconded. Your cheekbone sought and found a soft crevice beneath my clavicle and you settled your head in there, smiling, to sleep. We didn’t speak. Bare feet lying on their sides beneath bedclothes made cresting waves in the greyer sea of the sheets.
A balmy autumn breeze has been whistling its way through the broken molding of the open double-hungs; it cooled our salty, sweat-damp skin, and soldered us together as a single creature. Our now dry skin has bonded. The slightest motions shift the sensitive springs of the bed and they groans with the miniscule distance which perforce forms between us with the taking of breath. Since we draw air in synch, there is the slightest tension, a tugging of flesh reluctant to separate, with every exhalation, our chests and bellies compressing. It refuses to let go, this skin, our skin. Our bodies, so joined, are each reluctant to give the other up. There is the seeming cessation of plurality. We have grown together. But it’s more than just this sticking of skin.
My arm beneath you, pinioned, bent around the slight circumference of your waist, its wrist balanced on your back, has gone numb. Long past pins and needles, though assuredly attached, I can no longer tell by sight whether it’s definitely mine. Digits tickle the taut, soft skin beneath my hipbone and I don’t know if they, resting there, are my own torpid and calloused phalanges or the pink pads of your smaller fingers. The truth is irrelevant; the reality of the feeling is that, for the moment, we are one animal with twenty of these fingers and twenty toes.
You have pressed yourself so close I can feel the pumping of your heart in my ribs. I cannot feel my own.
The colder scientist of my rational mind remembers some chemistry: two surfaces, so close, will surely exchange the odd electron here or there. Too, there are thermodynamics: so close, my heat will diffuse to your ever-icy shape—your hands and feet and cheeks always so cold—until we meet at a median temperature. I understand forensics: when I wake, I will find on my thigh one of your short hairs; wrapped round the curl of my ear, one auburn, longer, fallen from your head. When you leave me, you will wear the essential oil of my fingerprints, you will be clad in an invisible dusting of my shed skin. For hours after, you’ve claimed the past, you can still taste the faint ash in my kiss; your sap is definitely in my moustache. I will carry your scent and you, mine. Lovers ineluctably leave bed with so many souvenirs of one another.
Eventually, we settle into a different rhythm. I draw my breath on the downbeat of your lungs. When you breathe in, I breathe out. Our faces, two palms apart, feature open lips connected along a diagonal line. You breathe out, I breathe in. Our faces, two palms apart, are involved in a tug-of-war. No: there is no conflict here. You breathe in, I breathe out: we are symbiotes sharing air. Soldered together, limbs entwined, entangled, enlaced; our once independent shapes having collected evidence of each other, we have, for this moment, become a single being sharing the same breath. The air of the room imagined as a tree, this respiration that connects us, reaching into all four of our lungs, is a root system tying us together.
In the present tense, the verb is blend. It means to mix two things together. Having done this, the word is blended; this means that things have been mixed. But there is another shape that this word can take, oft ignored, that better describes our body in this moment, in this bed: blent. Blent implies a total mixing, a complete indifferentiation of original elements. This tense is called past perfect because it implies a completed state with no remainder. Perfect.
My mind bobs on the surface of consciousness, but is sinking fast into sleep. Wind still whistles through cracks in the window casement and we breathe it in; the trunk of that phantasmal tree extending out of the house and taking the shape of the universe. Together, we breathe in this wind; our bodies grown together, blent, we suck the moon.
