to end in smoke

We’re talking over the phone about a piece he’s written. Something about the treatment of foreign women in prisons. He wants to test the argument and is asking me questions about his rhetorical stance. He rarely waits for me to answer. I already know he just wants me to tell him it’s amazing writing. I don’t hesitate to say it, because it is.

When he sent me the words, I was angry with him and didn’t want to help with edits. People get paid to do things like this, I fired back in an email filled with expletives and insults. But in the end I agreed. He knew I would. There’s something about him, his character, that I can never resist.

I was at first struck by the writing style. Concise and eloquent. His points made clearly and without clutter. And then I realized there was no reason for amazement. That his writing should be as crisp, fresh, and unfettered as he is when he’s close to me in the dark. That perhaps there isn’t much distinction between the way writers move their thoughts across a page and the way lovers move their hands across a thigh – an arm. Both blank canvasses waiting to be written upon. To have their composition irrevocably changed by the remaining impressions. Hands. Lips. Ink. No matter.

He’s still talking and I am still providing affirmations on cue.

He drops something, a few hundred miles away, and swears in a language I don’t understand. A subtle and unintentional reminder that I am an outsider. Someone who belongs on the other side of a phone. A few hundred miles away.

I already know we’re going to hang up soon. And it makes me remember our always-eventual good-byes and the ache that remains. Leaving me like a struck bell.

I hastily apologize for my behavior the other day. For acting childish and spoiled (these are the words he used against me at the time). I tell him that I understand what he meant. That the appeal always resides in the fact that I can’t attach him to anything. That I’ll never look at his face and see a mortgage or a car payment or years of emotional deprivation. He is silent. And only his breathing fades occasional over the line. He whispers my name as if I were in the room and he were holding me like a small child. I am drinking in the tones of his voice. Savoring each syllable as it drops through the line. I’ll miss him more than he knows.

“You are the tree,” he says, “and I am the smoke rising above your image. An exact reflection in shadow of every singular branch.”

After we hang up the lines, I think about how long it’s been since I’ve seen a smoke tree. How I’ve sat under them in the desert and let my thoughts roll up and get lost in their branches.