Bent Words

Bent Words

January 02, 2017

In my dream you were dying.

I saw your face and I knew. Somehow, no one else could see it. Or no one else was there. I called an ambulance to take you to the hospital and you were barely conscious. I watched them casually pack you up and unload you and place you near the other patients, all groaning under the heavy hand of pain.

They called your family. I watched them from a distance, one by one, find a seat by your side. Tears in their eyes. I ached to be them as near as they were. The words they uttered, I wish I could have spoken.

Suddenly I was on a bus. I asked the bus driver to circle around Nature Land, where you were lying out in the open below the trees. It was warm and verdant there, the smell of pine, but eerily quiet. We circled round and round until the last friend and family member made their departure.

10pm must be too late for visitors but I was stubborn.

The bus driver let me out down the road and I circled back through the dark woods; too dark for daylight.

And there you were, alone, save for the other patients who seemed suddenly to brighten at the sound of my footsteps. They were laughing with you and, for the first time in years, I heard your voice and remembered it's gruff tone. I saw the blue of your eyes and the shocking length of your hair as you whipped it back from your face. I could see your hands and instantly recalled their shape, their outline, their touch as though time never separated me from the memory. You seemed better now than when we first met. You seemed at peace and partnered with whatever destiny had in store for you. It made me so entirely happy.

I leaned in so close, closer than the space that should be allowed for two people.

But you didn't move. You didn't turn away or shrink back from my visage.

You let me find your dry, cracked lips and you let me kiss you tenderly.

And that shock to my senses struck me with such a force I felt I could no longer breathe. Nor did I really want to. I just let it linger. The luscious fullness wasn't sexual but it was sensual and loving and as old as the first day I fell in love with you.

I let it go before I wanted to but when I know I needed to. We were one without the world to worry about.

Finally I let the last words I would speak to you fall into the pine-scented air.

"No one has ever made me feel the way that you do."

And no one ever will.

Written at 4:28 p.m.