In the dark you can't tell what color his eyes are, but you know they're blue, the bluest of blues, unhidden behind lenses and crystal clear. Find the right kind of eyes and it's obvious you're just an animal; find the right pair and you won't know what hit you until your clothes are on his floor and the door is locked behind you.
It's dark, not the dark of caves but the dark of the city seventeen floors above the street and ten thousand feet below the streetlight bounce. I face him on one of the only two chairs out here under the sky so close that it feels like I could reach up and knock on it, surrounded by the only city I've ever been able to call home. We are alone.
I say, I don't want this to end. I don't want to be stupid about this, I don't want to get hurt. But I don't want this to end.
He says, This is now. Don't worry about later.
And it's true; there is always a part of one that is an historian, who plays the part of the pedant, who looks at the pieces of the past as lexicon of the future, that imagines a misinterpreted glance or a furtive clutch of the arm as a sign from before of what would come later. Those years ago and what didn't happen as a key to what did, in fact, come to pass; the ghost of me at your side during your heartache, pulling the pieces of the future from my mouth, walking beside you on the streets of your filthy metropolis.
I would be a jackal-headed god from the sands of an ancient civilization, a wary and clever hero of the desert; you would be the siren on the shore, forever out of reach and never quite singing the songs I want to hear. We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, the nameless faces of our barren deserts blown into a passing trajectory, the victims of history that will, in time, float to the bottom and be forgotten by the world. There were nameless lovers in the past, forgotten the same as nameless tribes who wandered the waterless places and left nothing but their bones under the dry earth.
Somewhere there is one who remembers. Everywhere else are those who forget.