“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
“Even more so now,” she said, her voice reverberating where her head lies in the crook of my neck, soft curls of her hair tickling my bare collar bone with every word. Four months and twenty two days ago she wrote our simple love story, and sent it to me. From her rainy grey city to my sun-blistered and sweltering one, by express mail, came our very first happy memories, dramatized and doused in tinted rose, through the clear, green-grey eyes of my sweet, sweet love. I had asked her if she still meant any of it., my dark eyes serious beneath the bright blue sky, the two of us nestled in the dappled sunlight, almost hidden in the open embrace of the big oak’s roots. I watched the other couples in the park, and wondered, with childlike self-interest, if they felt the way we did. When she answered my arms slid further around her waist, my fingertips resting in the niches her blooming hips made against the flat of her abdomen. And I thought all the stupid things every couple in the park was thinking, as I felt her kisses with the summer heat on my closed eyelids. I believed all the stupid things everyone believes as I felt the dirt beneath my fingertips, falling backwards with her mouth devouring mine, chest to chest, her fingers making combs right through my hair. It felt so special, finding someone just like you, who knows you and knows just what you want and tells you so, with nothing between you and her, forehead to forehead, eye to eye, gaze caressing gaze.
All just a week before we broke each other’s hearts and everything between them almost irreparably. All just a week before the façade of feeling was blown away by the disturbing complexity of the truth.
He sat on the bed, legs crossed, his long fingers running over the guitar strings with feminine delicacy; the way his long clusters of eyelashes sometimes brushed his cheekbones when he looked down. A smile was flirting with his lips, he knew he couldn’t sing. He gave me a direct, brown gaze and filled it with sweet, lingering passion. It made me smile, from where I lay tangled in his bedsheets on the pillows, drifting in and out of sleep. When I woke again, a long tanned foot was in my line of vision. I reached out and touched his foot for a moment, I was so happy to be close enough to touch any of him, then ran my eyes up the length of his body. I noted each shadow there: where a muscle in his thigh or proud hip jutted out through caramel skin, where ripples barely showed on flat stretches of abdomen, in the caves of his hunched shoulders, where he had forgotten to shave. There was a tempting sadness in my chest, that I rarely got to do this, but the brave joy, that this existed at all, took me over. He had been watching me watch him, and his eyes met mine with a smile in them, he pushed himself forward and kissed my lips chastely, quietly almost. I kept my eyes open, already regretting my scarce hours of sleep, not wanting to waste a second of him. So did he, and we kissed, less gentle now, the familiar desperation of approaching goodbyes burning us both. Burning us both with a separate loneliness, only welding us closer together. He held me and we kissed our fear of separation, with eyes wide open until all I could see of him was blurred by my tears.
Two weeks before I’d heard he’d met another girl. It had been a month, then. The memories of his fingers’ touch on my back, on the back of my neck, on the shoulder bones he called my “wings” were just knots of loneliness in my throat, hot tears between my fingers. I curled up and played dead until he watered me with his tears, and cried me back to life with remorse. I gradually became sure of his love again, I was still unsure of everything about us other than that. I knew almost nothing about him, except that I wanted him more in every waking moment.
Just a day later, I knew everything was special, with her.
He turned his face up under mine and whispered forever into our kiss. I looked over my knees at his purposeful serenity, his bright innocent eyes, inches away and I felt happy. I believed in all the stupid things, but I knew not how easily they could be forgotten. And so, my memories of her lay forgotten, like Autumn leaves beneath the leafy summer trees, and I said yes, and laughed with happiness that was simple in that moment and pulled him closer, sitting between his knees felt like the closest aI had ever been to home. And so he fluttered his heart-shaped lips along the skin between those imaginary wings of mine, my heart innocent as a forgetful child is, felt like it was flying.
I knew she saw other girls. She knew I saw other men. We thought we understood that these things, these special stupid things between us, were more than anyone else ever could be. She asked me not to say yes, that’s all she ever asked, but a week later I said yes to him. She told me she was miserable without me, I told her I was only happy when she was there, and each of us believed the stupid things she said/ We cried for hours, because in four months and twenty nine days it was the first real sadness to disturb our stupid and special type of happiness and afterwards we both secretly doubted that the special stupidity would return.
That night I dreamed I was an angel. Everyone I knew, people I loved, people I hated., people I watched make out in the park., had come around me in a half circle and tied me to a chair. My wings were bound, a swathe of white cloth crushed my chest and I was gagged with thick rope. A panic rose in me, terror and hurt combined in a Hellish nightmare of the heart. I felt the blackness of the fear and sadness threaten to fill my lungs and suffocate me, just as I woke. I opened my eyes with the same feeling, and the weight of it still pains my chest, and fills me with inexplicable loneliness.
I told them both that they were everything, and together I know that they are. Since they’re mutually exclusive, that means the man I marry will only fill half my heart and the girl who makes me complete will be loved,, like stupid, special, dark things, in secret, between the shadow and the soul. I fly with one wing, I see with one eye, I love each with one half of my heart.
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