They lay sheets off in the darkness of dawn. A deep and profound calm had finally settled onto their two seas, now quickly flowing out of each other into their separate channels.
He looked at her, tried to look through her through her eyes. Although her eyes showed very little, he knew. He knew that she was clinging onto the moment, fiercely and tenaciously hanging onto this piece of time they had carved out by making a wave, a tiny ripple, with their bodies. He stroked her and grinned: he knew that she didn’t want him to speak, didn’t want him to disrupt the silence that she thought meant oneness. She had told him before that she hated words, because they had a way of shattering moments and being with.
But one had to come up eventually. One had to surface.
Their times alone with the drapes drawn eventually only focused on rushing and that rushing engulfed. There was no room for thoughts when the mind was overflowing, running over with sensation. Sensation took the brain and carried it off, ‘til before one knew it, one had already gone over the waterfall and now lay on the bank, first gasping, then breathing slowly, listening to the river you had just ridden churn. And that was all that was on your mind when you were riding the water: the river, its churning, and you trying to flow with it.
But once on the bank, the mind begins to empty itself of sensation and becomes filled again with thoughts, words, memories, faces, guilt, exhaustion, wondering, wants, shame, sticky, worries, the next day, itchiness, hot, pain, cold, yourself.
Now they lay listening to what he thought was the river, what she thought was a lapping sea. But it was neither.
He was still grinning at her, so she smiled back at him. But soon his grinning lips formed to begin to divide the air.
She shrieked inaudibly with her eyes, with her body and the color in her face, and she met his face to stop his speaking. And he began to churn.
(C) Copyright 2005 by K. M. Camper
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