The Winter Sun

The winter sun was a brilliant white dividing the sky into a periwinkle-blue with purplish, shadowed clouds above, and an orange and golden horizon below with red-rimmed clouds and the silhouettes of the distant hills rolling underneath. The two of them sat on a worn, once-green wooden park bench together, comfortably separated, one absorbing what was before them, half of a lit cigarette with a glowing end matching the color of the lower sky in his right hand, and the other one peering into the sunset, bundled up in a heavy jacket, a tight, knit scarf wrapped around his neck, arms folded across his chest, shivering.

"It’s beautiful,” the first said after taking a puff of his cigarette.

“But cold,” the other said after a slight pause, his response falling with a dull thud like a heavy weight.

The first man’s cigarette grew brighter as he breathed in. “You always did look on the darker side of things.”

The other man didn’t turn to look at his friend who was squinting at him. The icy air burned his nose and lungs. “I never said it wasn’t beautiful. But it ain’t warming anything up, so it doesn’t do a damn thing for me.”

The first man sighed a mouthful of smoke. He continued to gaze at the silent, bright globe slowly descending into the earth.

“You forget that I used to make things beautiful.”

“I don’t forget it. I just wonder why you stopped.” His friend had stopped shivering and sat back limp on the bench. A piercing breeze dragged some wrinkled, curled-up, lingering fall leaves, crinkling as they disintegrated, through the stiff, frozen grass. “I haven’t stopped. I won’t stop.”

The other man returned his statement with a lofty grin. “Well, Hill, you have always been a better man than me.”

“Not better just—” But the other man cast Hill a look telling him not to continue the sentence he had heard him say many times before.

He then took his look and cast it down onto the ground. He gave a short sigh of a laugh. “Supposedly, I was once being redeemed, too.”

The bench creaked as Hill shifted his weight. He inspected his cigarette, which was almost through, and threw it to the ground. The cigarette rolled across the asphalt sidewalk in front of them until it stopped a few feet away, burning fiercely red against the black.

Hill got up off the bench and stretched. “Well, I think if you once were, you still are.”

His friend grunted as he rose from the bench. Before they walked away, his friend ground the cigarette into the asphalt with the toe of his shoe until it was out. “You’re going to start a forest fire that way,” he muttered flatly.

Hill only laughed and slapped him on the back, and they began walking to his house. The sun had finally crawled behind the frozen earth, leaving behind only a faint yellow-hued stain, with the blue-grey night speedily filling the empty space left by the giant orb.

(C) Copyright 2006 by K. M. Camper

"Reaching across the Gulf" Part II

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

"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