Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
I always imagined it like this, with a drifting breeze that cuts through the dense heat. We sit on the cement porch. I'm between your legs, folded on the rug, and you sit above me and look out across the front yard. There's a gravel drive leading toward the house and beyond, flat grasslands and spreading oak trees.
The afternoons are the hottest and they lull me to rest, just as it was when I was a child. Your fingers play with my hair and although I have never felt such intimacy before you, it seems an old and comfortable feeling.
"There's something here that reminds me of England," you say gently. Your voice nearly mixes with a frog croaking somewhere in the distance. Every night you've complained of its groaning bellow.
"You feel the age here, too?" I ask.
You nod and reach down to thumb the hoop earrings I wear. "It's old. The Spanish moss hanging from the trees here is very old. The insects are old."
You've gone contemplative, a state only I have the pleasure of seeing.
I pull an answer from you. "Is that why you wanted to stay here?"
"Partly that. It makes me feel inspired. And to be in places where the great Blues musicians were born, but also to be here where you were born."
I hum and bring my hand to find your idle one, which rests on your knee. "Did I ever tell you about the muddy river I swam in as a child?"
"No," you say. "Tell me."
"I didn't bring a bathing suit, so I was only in my underwear. And the bottom of the river was so silty and the water so opaque I couldn't see the bottom. There were other children there and my uncle and father, but I don't remember much else. It was so long ago."
"It's strange how our minds parse our past. I remember something similar from my childhood, swimming in a lake at night."
There is harmony in our pasts. We are only a year apart and have known life after the war, but you always seem to have lived much longer than I have. Your thoughts revolve around the huge topics: life and existence, the making of the world, how we should be. We have spent nights together talking about it all.
The sun has begun to set to the left of the house. Bright orange colors the clouds and pink bursts from above the trees. I touch your leg to turn your attention to the sky.
"Beautiful," you say. We watch a big cumulus float on some invisible string. Your fingers have stilled in my hair. "It would be a good scene to paint."
"If you'd like, I'll buy you oil paints and an easel."
You chuckle a laugh, so light and airy. "You'll be my first subject," and wrap your arms around my shoulders. "Come up here. Come sit with me."
I smile at your command and unravel myself to rise and sit on your lap. The chair is large and comfortable, but still I struggle to wrap my limbs around you. You pull me closer and the natural smell of you, slightly spicy, enters my nose.
"There you are," you say. "So lovely."
I flame with the compliment; I bury all fears into your hair, which is soft, and exhale.
I wish, I wish, I wish . . . my thoughts are always active, never ceasing, and I cannot bring myself to enjoy the warmth of your skin and the rising chirps of the cicadas.
"Can I ask you something?" I whisper in your ear and reach to kiss the soft lobe.
"You can ask me anything."
I swallow. "What will happen in the future? Between you and me, I mean."
"That's always the question." You stroke my back to comfort me. Maybe you're trying to touch my worries away. "We don't know what will happen."
I hate this reply. "But what if --"
And you shush me, holding me tight and close in a squeezing grip. My cheeks ache with the threat of tears. I let you rock me. I let you hum a jazz tune into my skin. I let you care for me as none have before. Here it is, something like home.
For the extremely talented and lovely -starsailor thank you for waiting <3 My mind is very much in this piece at the moment.
