new york
i’ll smoke before going up, i said, as cigarettes are often prologues to unknown eras. and i see myself smoking in front of the brick building close but not too close to where cars stay for hours maybe days while i glance over the main entrance—which is the main exit too although they always say entrance, this is the entrance, they say, they never say it is the exit too—to make sure i am where we said i would be and i see myself thinking i cannot stay for days maybe hours.
i felt your presence not in a metaphorical way but in a tangible way and that presence felt familiar as if it was my own which is not to be taken without surprise as you had not been tangible in me in months almost years. but our bodies appear to know each other as if bodies have memories of other bodies as if one’s body chooses a specific set of bodies it can hold memories of as if my body chose yours. and i know you are close and my body knows yours is expected. and i see our bodies. now that my presence is no longer physical, i can see our bodies. the tips of her tired fingers feeling his warm unattended skin in an attempt to say all i am unable to utter. and i hear you asking about my thoughts. repeatedly. but i could not allow those thoughts to live in the space i am borrowing from you because i know of our shared fragility. have you heard of kintsugi? i wish you knew how much i wanted to say. but what would we do with those words?
you turned the lights off as you talked about a landscape i once belonged to. you said you had not noticed the view right away but when you did you knew that that was the place you needed to exist in and i see you thinking what a view and i know then that i’ll memorize your body in that landscape—the one you belong to, the one i used to belong to too, the one that is now ours. yes, the imprint of that landscape in that moment is ours only. is timescape even a word?
and the lights were still off as you talked about things that you never talk about and i see our naked bodies sharing salt sharing water sharing fear. forgive me if my silence was what was mostly heard. and she sees her naked body and she sees his naked body and she sees raw thick threads perforating their naked bodies violently, gluing their naked bodies as if souls were to exist. as if (this) love were to exist. i note-we are always in the endings of what we never started and thus i wonder if i am but temporary stay in the passage of you as time.
you kissed me on the back of my neck as you zipped my brown silky dress up. you kissed me where my neck becomes neck, on a soon to become body. i wondered if you had invented that part of my body right there and then, if it came to existence to be kissed by you only. as i was leaving, that body that became body with you stays with you as it can only exist in that moment, in that place. did you hear all i did not say?