The sun fought its way through the thick glass panes haphazardly muddied with cream coloured paint. She squinted at the checker-board window, training her eyes from one square to the next in a game against herself, to pass the time, to shrink her surroundings and feel normal again. Unconsciously, her gaze sought the angle where the rays bent at a slightly different angle, where they could cast a soft and yellow hue that felt warm. Her fantasies were nothing but bits and pieces of memory strained through a gossamer of fiction and self, woven from her want. As she lay there in her bunk, chasing the sun as much as it sought her, this is the thought that struck her - as abstract as could be. Even this moment in which she remembered her hands encasing Alex's body for the first time was a liminal space. Somewhere between the luminosity of desire and the mottled reality of memory.
First her fingers had rested in the hollows of Alex's ribs. Next they had lazily climbed and traced them, as though surveying, mapping the topography, staking claim to the heart that beat just beneath – just between – where it couldn't be touched. Perhaps in the frustration of that realization, Piper, flushed, had bitten the back of the woman's hand, all the while holding her in a steady gaze. In response, Alex had opened herself for Piper to enter where she could, pushing and pulling and warming her skin.
Alex had spooled a thread of Piper, of her desire, of the hands that had touched her before as they prospected for that beautiful intangibility, of the formerly unknown to Piper that had made her as much as what was familiar to her. And in so doing, Alex – the tailor, the costumer, the mender - stitched the woman back to her self, suturing the ragged cloths of Patchwork Piper. There was nothing gentle in it then. It was in equal parts a taking possession and an exquisite surrender for them both.