Sometimes, I get strange little things. This one is no different.
To those who know the title, YES – it is for that. I've yet to get down to the business with it, but this is bits and pieces. Who cares, though? It felt like I could relate it. (I am strange, afterall.)
It's of the same whatever that "Verse & Point" was – 86 the names and distinctions. It wants to live in its ambiguity.
He lay in my arms, once asking me if he was too heavy and if he was hurting me. The pressure of his forearm wrapped tightly around my waist melded with the far-away look I was casting towards the ceiling as I gave him a simple "no". Though I felt caged and his head resting on my shoulder did prove to be somewhat painful for the duration, I reveled in feeling his breath skim across my breast bone and loved the way he'd unconsciously grab at my waist when I shifted beneath him. He pulled me in so close; I thought I was just an extension to his being, another part of him that I could love.
He had the hands of a saint and the eyes of a sinner. He was the preciousness of blood for wine and body for bread; alter of wanton love and confessional of taming lust. He was a paradox in his existence, one I'd grown to rely on for quiet affirmation. He'd crash and burn at the drop of the proverbial dime, yet rise from his smoldering on wings of eagles. For a man to hold such magical peace, he was the epitome of tumultuous seas deafening far away ports of Zion.
He loved so hard, so truthfully and honestly, that at times it felt violent. Whether in the passionate words he'd write on his bedroom mirror when insomnia rang the doorbell or the way he could catch my wrists as I was pushed farther into his mattress, it was always for the greater love that he couldn't contain. I'd find my name in places that I shouldn't see, in drawers I shouldn't sift through. I heard him whisper his prayers when he thought that the evening had left me spent. Always of love, always of need, and always weeping when he thought that I would run away.
The road had been long, dusty trails that we'd crawled upon to reach our togetherness. I was too emotional; he was too withdrawn. I was too willing to throw away everything that I'd worked for while he just wanted to see me fly. He'd been where I'd been and couldn't stand to see me so frivolous with what I'd been given. At times, he would admit that I was his vicarious occasion; I was who he lived through to be what he couldn't. It brought us closer and pushed us apart at the same time.
Truth be told, we were of east and west. We tried to follow our paths, hoping that at some point, we'd end up behind the other. We only passed each other along the tropics. I told him a story of the walking path and how it doesn't always hurt to turn around. He gazed at me with appreciation, asking if I'd ever turn around for him. The look on his face told me that he'd been waiting on Capricorn, turned to see if I would follow.
Love; he took no time in calling it. He didn't wait for a special occasion or a life-threatening altercation. He just did and I did. We did. People would have you believe that mentioning it so much would render it worthless, but it only helped to shift the poles. North and South we'd become, never straying too far before going in the opposite direction. For we were both zenith and nadir, and love lay somewhere amidst sharing Cancer.
I looked down on him, such a wonderful man, my man. His legs lay knotted in my mine, hips pressed onto hips. Yerushalayim Shel Zahav played itself into my ears, a twisted metaphor so incongruous yet strangely biblical. He'd become Bathsheba and I found myself to be Solomon, linked along meridian lines. This was what it forever should be: wondrous and admiring glances to those in bathtubs.