"Reaching across the gulf"

She breathed in as he dove, plunged into her sea. For a moment, she held her breath as if she were waiting for something. But that moment soon passed and was washed up and mixed into a larger moment of sensations and feelings, flesh sliding up against flesh, lines being drawn all over her with fingers, he moving in and out of her, she moving on and around him, both moving over each other. The moment of trying to push together, of trying to become a part of each other, of trying to flow into and out of, of mixing. The moment of trying to reach across the gulf that one finds between yourself and others. The moment of working towards something singular and unified, one.

Breath and hair and breathing and sweating and spit and the white foamed sea flowing out, the slipping, the sheets, hot and dark and struggle and grasping and the entangling, trying to force and squeeze and push together.

Moans and gasping but no words. Words were not allowed, could not enter, could not help. Words hurt. They devastated. They didn’t put together. They demolished. Words were not fluid. They were chopped up into syllables and sounds with tongue taps and lips closing and teeth, breaths and swallowing. Words were always chopped up: each one was chopped up into meaning. And because they didn’t flow, if you tried to speak what you felt, what you meant could be chopped up and examined according to the pieces, picked and ripped a part. They would deconstruct, lose their meaning. It was because each word had a meaning and sometimes all the meanings didn’t add up. Sometimes the individual meanings, a single word, could subtract from what you meant. And you couldn’t control really control meaning or what words meant, either. We each learn the arbitrary meaning of arbitrary sounds from our parents. And even if you tried to own words, possess them, make them mean what you meant, how could anyone else know what you were doing with what was yours? They would just make your words theirs but still call them yours. They would molest them. And you couldn’t do anything about it.

And you couldn’t help but molest other people’s words either. You couldn’t help but make the words that other people gave you yours. It seemed to be a very human thing to do, to take and fuck what’s been given to you.

But even as she was trying to be fluid, they kept creeping in. She thought maybe if they shoved and pushed more, maybe the pushing and shoving would push and shove them out. Maybe if they kept squeezing closer together, there would be no room for the words, no room for them to breathe, no room for breath at all, no room for air, the air that allowed words to come. Air that meant space. Distance. Two.

(C) Copyright 2005 by K. M. Camper