Alouette

I wrote this on 28 March 2011,  before this summer even happened. I wrote this full of aching nostalgia and dreams of what was to come. And now, reading it over, I feel like it embraces and illustrates everything that I have felt in the past four months out in the wilderness of my summer. I am no wonderful storyteller or psychic muse. But this shakes me to my core in its accuracy.

This is my first post in months, and may be for a while to come. I’ve weaned myself off of this, and I honestly prefer the distance.

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Love is that moment ripped from the inside, torn from the stitches of your very soul.

When you scream in denial on the bathroom floor, but bleed for the very moment that your lips will part and half-sigh, half-moan those well-worn words as they partake in bittersweet communion.

How your eyes will be full of spangles and dust, coughing in the wake of the churned up roadside dirt, the hot leather, untouchable steering wheel, grass stained Levi’s.  The baptism of those midsummer thunderstorms, howling with the fury of a child’s tantrum, short-lived but demanding attention on your cheeks, on your hands, in those rivers and runways of your neck, collarbone, and that comfortable little hideaway behind your knees. That concave, convex little body as a platform for resolution and watery liberation. Dripping off your nose and tipping over into the holy hollow of your open mouth. Washing away the long nights that have left you sore and grumbling after refusing to shut-eye while the going was still smooth and stubbornly wanting to continue the midnight marathons and drink that tepid iced tea, the flavor diluted from the once-cracking ice cubes.  The yellowed quilts, old memories enveloping your summer-sticky shoulders, you crawl up inside yourself and timidly regard that fellow beside you.

No part is so real, so truthful, so high of stakes as it is now.

When love is returned, what will be the consequences? To know it yet is a mystery, an undefinable horror of pleasure and pain.

The bitten nails of worry, the tangles of matted hair, the eyeliner besmirched by the sweat and the tears and the dancing glaze and the three past eves without a well-deserved shower. In every stitch of it, there are your mistakes and your marks of presence, knowledge that you were here, present in my existence. Partake and partook. Jack’s whisky and glitter on my carpet, torn stockings and boots on my body trailing your scent.  Torn out sonnets and pictures and secretly passed notes in church. Laughter ringing in my memory, in the bed, in the rooms of peeling wallpaper.

Back in the grass we shall go, calling forth that scorching sun to peel away the layer of wintry haze and cold indifference we passed. Like a snake, curl forth in a shimmering warm embrace of sultry bronze and sun kissed hair. Shoes with mud and laces torn left behind on the woodchips, and calling for the hills to carry my steps. And the lake will carry our bodies forth in the full moon, as big as it ever was, lucidly enlightening what always was.

But till now, bite your lip. Little, little.