I am reincarnated again. I am a lost love repeatedly, a concubine clean, a dead child who didn’t waste her life through her veins. Fate tells me like a skein of sparkling thread, but I am bound tighter than any trinket, harder than any stone. This is Merlin’s tree and an offer of freedom. He takes the Crows commission and takes it for his own, twists it to take me, this forbidden fruit to innocently taste.
It started with dinner, looking out over a strangely private slice of the city from the Cin Cin balcony, red blood pooling on the plates. The music, incongruous renditions of a certain look at classic rock, was at one point an insouciant pop style rendition of Moondance with italian singing. Actually it started before that, with meeting someone on the street and deciding on Robson street. Preceding that was my apartment and asking hard to answer questions like, “where do we go for dinner?”
The staff treated us like we were honeymooning. Careful bowing out just on the edge of vision. Our waiter whisked plates away and laughed with us like a delighted friend. Dressed in black and matching again, outside alone in the cold, our silverware not warmed but inconsequential. I had a query to answer about travel. Would I go with, if circumstances permit. It’s across an ocean, it’s across a language. Culture rift, a plane a raft. Somehow later they were surprised when I offered them a key to my apartment. Logic failed a little there, I think, but anything it might occur to me to need was met. I remember Marissa listing out her haves and have nots. “He must be smart, have a car, and have brown eyes. No idiots.” I never could list my own, I would try to make up things to placate her. “Er, long hair, intelligent, um, a sense of humour.” I guess it was a date, but I think too, that we skipped that part. Six months in two weeks, like last time I was in love, but better because we trust each other.
I’ll never find someone quite like you again.
This was a living inkwell of liquid pain, searing in my fingers and bones. A painful dream of needing to touch you. Attraction unhealthy, wanting you to slide with me. This is your name tattooed on my skin over and over and over again. It won’t let me alone, not alone, not without you. It’s history stained needles bright with Procyon heat, it’s a binary. Spinning in tandem, serious as the brightest sun in its divine constellation, you burn me. An animated tremor of painting my cusp with your breath, you inhabit or reside within as such a spirit, force or principle that it takes me and blinds my tongue as deaf as my eyes. When you stay it is a carnal victory, an unexpected reprieve from trembling in darkness, curled in a ball. This is a heart implant, a sighing beating force of body breeding and delicacy thrown away. Archaic temptation satiation, driving spikes into my mind. The sweetest stigmata craving release into blood in the palms of our hands, all curling fingers and sweaty seer visions. The sound of arms bending in unconscious ballet grace to knead you closer in to me. After a while the word with becomes to.
It’s not a fabian policy, but basic violence. Pointing the way to greater good through biting my lips and drawing your tears in linen sheets. No strategy past honesty, past asking please. There’s no compare for my witch eyes. The worst is not so secretly accusing you of incubi, sensing somehow that it might be true. The nightmare is needing you, requiring something beyond myself and unrequited for honey tongued evenings. I have a sense of justice because I know the taste of rage. This is strings music, soft orchestra humming along to the rhythm of pride. If I were myself of a year ago, I would be ashamed.
There’s no reason I should say your name in Russian, you pull tongues from me. It’s a pun, meaning both mouse and bear depending on the language. I suppose I’ve named you. An issuant creature, mighty when it roars. Portraiture of everything that everyone else sees, like a private joke of my ability to stare past it all to look out through your eyes. I don’t know what kind of tree hasn’t any leaves or how I see the beach but I know what the sand feels like on the bottom of your feet. The tremor is abusable, but this time the shifting earth sends its regards. A richter scale heard through walls to cry out muffled into pillows and mouths. Doppler collision of breath and body. A cello sweep of hair, I said, and I stand by it. Thick like the smell of wine, I want to lick every tousled strand of white. I can never explain, not properly, though I’m more than willing to try. It’s like a practiced first, everything leading up to your moments, your lucid voice. Snick into place, like a well honed blade. There’s no ballot here for intimacy, the mannerisms married without us. In transit there is choice, but your kisses taste of storm static. Birth of the universe desire, the crackle of snow on the dead channels. White and black chaos patterns, feedback moments scientists dream of and touch themselves in their sleep.
