Alex lies beside her, wondering:
Is she an ally or an axis? Someone with me or against -- a consort or antithesis? Where does our pivot lie? Is it a point of contention or connection? A bridge, or a burning house?
She’s like a wheel to him, a willful cosmos spinning, and he’s the little ball that lands on random and often imaginary numbers. He’s the croupier who must figure out what the numbers signify, and to whom.
And every number’s sacred, sure, but how exactly, that’s what matters. She makes him dizzy, even while she’s sleeping and especially when she’s awake.
He stares up at the ceiling, thinks he knows the trick. He needs to figure out how to surmount that center between them, while it’s spinning, to scale the spokes undetected, and once he's there all he's got to do is bend the chaos into something determined.
Determined, without deterring from their flow.
He tells her stories while they’re making love. Children’s stories while he’s in her. Something they can laugh to, converting lust to laughter, turning procreation into a creation you can hear as well as taste, imagine as well as dance to. It changes everything in their dynamic, distracts them enough to enjoy the act their bodies enact. Because when its just flesh to flesh it degenerates all too quick into a race toward crux and climax; and they’re both very tired of that particular narration.
He’s the air and she’s the fire and where they meet is above the water but the problem is that neither of them wants to be the stone. And so of course it’s all instable. All clouds and nowhere to rest the feet.
Alex lies beside her and he can’t drift off to sleep. He has this notion that if they could figure out the rhythm of their together, they’ll be given something extraordinary. Already their interaction is chemical, something done with wires by guys in white smocks and protective eyewear. Something involving superconductors, particle accelerators, and the like. Only it’s no joke when their atoms collide. No joke at all, but something vicious.
Vicissitude: ever changing, unpredictable.
I’ll never know what’s going on until we find a way to cleave together without needing to cleave apart in the very next now we find. It must be a tightrope thing, something wholly intuitive. Something done with a sixth and secretive sense, juggling the first and second and third, the me and her and us, in a dance that’s graceful. In an orbit that’s less a fall and more a flight.
Am I an acrobat or just another fool?
Alex lies beside her, thinking all the things he doesn’t know a damn about. It’s all beyond and so little belong, he thinks, tracing the winds of night with the shapeless figures of his mind.
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