leave-takings

Leaving stings the skin. Like an indelicately placed burn from the sun. Our bodies recover, still bearing the mark. Returning us to a different place in time. Dimensions in which we are less than whole. Less, possibly, than we imagine ourselves to be now. When the white shades of the afternoon revealed the footsteps of the devil dancing. The pull of two tan hands against mottled sandstone. Back. Thighs. Chest. Wringing out the stains like last week’s soiled laundry. Like his father’s money. A down payment meant to slough off the past. Sanding down my skin to reveal the pulpy insides. Ripe and acrid as an orange. Waiting to be bitten by those white teeth. Pressed by those clean palms. Smoothed like a piece of white bond paper. Snapped into the typewriter on which to pound out another story. His story. Of me wearing a bathing suit in front of his parents. His friends. Where I am not an imperfection reflected in his million-dollar smile. There couldn’t have been anything to say when those hands, gliding over my back like summer kites, collided with the words spilling out of his lips, breathed into my skin -- you’re almost error free. The interstices between calculation, observation, salvation, and judgement blurred as his mouth counted its way down my spine. Collapsed my spine. And while bodies claimed one another. Taking possession of hips with hands. Embedding a false sense of love through the matching of lips and tongues. I tied mental ropes around his arms and legs. Resourceful gags. Made lists of personal items I would pack in my tennis bag hanging on the hook behind the closet door. The puma glowing in the darkness. My copy of Native Speaker underneath the bed. The red silk robe spilled only moments ago, like blood, in a pool on the slick ceramic tile. I already felt the pocket change, heavy and cold in my hand. Awaiting the bus. Fourteen blocks from here it would come. We would come. Then it could all be over. Me carrying my bag like there were other places I wanted to go. Him trailing after in boxer shorts the color of money. Each wanting to take back whatever we had done to set our souls running in opposing directions. Wanting the wave of our desire to sweep us up. Deliver us closer to the beginning of time. On the bus, while his fingerprints were still indelibly scribed on my flesh – his hot breath in my hair -- we became wild birds let loose from their cage. Without a common language to find our way back home.