He would never climb on top of me. I do not know if it was out of fear that he would crush me I was so tiny then, or if it was always me moving over his landscape… In the end, no mountain ever comes to the one who would scale it.
He was a mountain, round and hard and soft, his mouth a dark tunnel inside of the rock with no end and no place for me to go. I found his mouth the night I traced his arm out in the twilight, and he my ankle in a hand-on-soft love song with no words spoken. I did not know then that there would never be words enough for my chattering heart inside of this man -- that to get to the heart of stony men sometimes can take the kind of explosives that destroy the rock within.
In the end, you get nothing but dust.
(Every other man, every one of my more slender suitors felt more hollow for the absence of the giant who dominated my peripheral vision, and who lingers there with golden hair and a dominating smile looking off to noplace I can fathom without words.)
I peered at the lines at the corners of his eyes like moss on stone, and wanted to force him to move, to roll. But he only turned away, inside, into his own head, and quietly asked me to go with all the will he had to be alone, quelched by his fear to breathe.
And I had only just told him that I would stay.
He laid in his stony silence and allowed me to find the pieces and valleys I would never find again that night. He is a quiet giant still now; how silent he could have been -- how stony could I have grown to match his coolness, if I could have been melded to the rock that was his heart, calling hotly across the valley? I speak to it slowly against a sunset, and watch the colors of his landscape bleed from where first I saw them by his side, down into my memory.
I dance away from another cliff, rendered in sienna and umber.
I sing another kind of love song with all of the words I could want.
And then I indulge myself in more words.
And more.
But he will only hear my echo. And I will hear it all.