Dead Flowers | H.S.

Epilogue

May 5th, 1973

It was nearing noon whenever Harry finished taping the last box in the apartment. It was a box full of our shoes, and he had bit his lip hard when he realized that he had three times the amount of footwear as me. I had been in the empty living room while he finished up the bedroom, sweeping the polished wooden floors and dusting the windowsills.

"I can't believe what I'm about to say," Harry called from the bedroom, "but I just finished up the  last box."

I froze over the counter, moving swiftly to the turntable sitting on the makeshift table of phone books, and turned Abbey Road off. Harry was standing in the doorway with the box in his arms, and his eyebrows raised.

"Well, what do you know. We're all packed up and ready to go." Gently, I moved my hand to my lips and felt the chapstick Harry had smeared on only an hour ago.

We looked at each other for a long time then, drinking in our last moments in the little apartment above the book store on Sunnyside. It was the apartment we had made love in an outrageous number of times, the apartment we had conceived a child in, the apartment we had lost Alba in, the apartment I had bled in, the apartment Harry had hid in whenever the ghost of me dragged her feet across the tile in the bathroom. It had served as a first home for the both of us, and the lump in my throat had proved that it was no walk in the park to leave it.

Harry gently set the box on the floor and let his eyes wash over me and my paint-stained overalls. I imagined that he saw the wispy bangs he had cut in the tiny bathroom while I read Sons and Lovers aloud for the third night in a row. I imagined that he saw the nakedness of my complexion, the length of my locks, the crease between my eyebrows, the rose in my cheeks, the sad smile painting my lips, the sag of my breasts without a bra or shirt on beneath my overalls. He drank me in for a long time, a small smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

Harry had let his curly hair grow out to cover his ears and some of his forehead, a la Mick Jagger 1967. He had grown leaner in the time of my absence, later telling me that he had dedicated a larger part of his routine to running, and each one of his shirts-including his favorite Velvet Underground tee-clung to his physique and molded around his prominent muscles. His cheeks glowed a rose colored gold, and his jaw clenched around a piece of mint gum.

We moved to another at the same time, always gravitating to each other like the North and South magnets we were. I touched my nose to his and held the back of his head delicately.

"Can you believe it?" I whispered softly, kissing the side of his lips, his Adam's apple, his Cupid's bow, his chin.

"No, pinch me," he whispered back, fingers loosening the straps of my of my overalls as my fingers settled at the hem of his flimsy Pink Floyd t-shirt.

Quietly, we undressed another, stopping in between unbuttoning to kiss each other the way lovers did, with tongue and spit and teeth and wandering hands. Just as the rain began to pelt the windows I'd just scrubbed, Harry kneeled before me and pressed his lips against my full stomach and empty uterus. There was soon not a square inch of my body that had not been kissed, sucked, caressed, pinched, loved.

The old, paint splattered sheet on the floor became our makeshift bed whenever I finally gave in to Harry's tugging and fell onto the floor beside him. Even after our period of separation (the Dark Ages), Harry was familiar to me. Every tattoo, every scab, every mole, every scar, every hair, pimple, goose bump; I read them like a map written in brail and navigated his body with an expertise Laney never achieved.