Liquid gaze

You turn your head slightly and bend, so available to listen with intention.You fix your eyes on mine without averting them once and walk dance-like steps of easy conversation.
Legs open, back  reposed to the club chair's embrace, I can't help but imagine what it would  feel like to inhabit a body of a stud, without the burden of shame or inadequacy.

I can't - or even care to - decide whether this intimacy tango is premeditated or the connection is borne out of oxytocine's flow in the room: by proximity, and not of our own making, by relative re- consolidation of their combustible attraction. I think the latter. The most disarming quality of yours has been  this honesty and effortlessness that was there from the start. If not for the faint film of grief, at the corners of the lips, the intonation of speech, the side cast glance, the restraint of emotional timbre, this availability could  have been translated quickly as a turn-off, as cheap arrogance.  Loss is the catalyst and shared dialect.

Your broad strokes cover entire subjects, against  my Phaedrus preoccupation for detail.
The diving naked into tropical waters versus scaling edges of an arid canyon. The certainty and comfort of faith, opposing the angst of Sisyphean control. The dynamism of power, to my ploy of pity. The living life versus a theatrical approximation of it.

I am erecting skeletons of future stories, tinker-toying with fantasies, willing them to come alive and grateful I am that I can once again feel out my soul.

There is grace in planning a garden for one more spring, in seeking redemption, in staking a bold claim on hope.
For now, I will just plunge into that watery gaze.


nautil.us/issue/33/attraction/love-is-like-cocaine