19 April 2012
'The light flickers as it turns on, and I hear her moan beneath the blanket. I am awake, but she’s still somewhere in between. The morning sun searches across the bed and settles on her uncovered shins, and I can’t think of an image that more perfectly encapsulates the promise of a new day. I put my elbow on the pillow, hand on my head, and watch. I tell my nanomachines to record what I see; the back of her soft neck, her exposed shoulder, the blond hair tugged behind her ear, and I am ready to catch her first smile. She mutters in her sleep and caresses her face against the pillow, and I commit every small motion to memory, capture all of it in a hundred digital photo stills, forever accessible.
She wakes up softly and turns over to look at me. And there it is; that smile, a dagger and a thousand suns all in one, her eyes my oval-shaped demise. I feel my blood freeze. I’m too scared to move. Afraid to do anything that might shatter this moment.
Her hand touches my neck and pulls me to her awaiting lips. I bristle as we kiss, a slave to that chilling sensation of her fingertips on my skin. The day is just begun and already my senses are overrun. She is my phantom reward for making it this far; a change of fate and chance. My heart feels heavens wide, completely vulnurable, for her to caress or run through. Nothing can save me now and nothing can break me now. Everything aches and nothing will ever hurt again.
I press her against me and we are two halves of a whole. We are thieves, each stealing from the other that which doesn’t belong to us, sampling a love intended for another. I am in her, but I am there alone. She is not mine and I am not hers. She will never be willing to live in my fantasia, accept that half of my life is lived within the corridors of my own imagination, in my mind’s torrid sea. Won’t respect my leaves of absence, my shying away and vying for the unreal.
And we both know and we don’t say. We ignore the signs a little longer and infect each other so we can be together, put down in our lips and ignorance. We chase this morning, maintain that love is something we make but not something we feel, and stay in the sun while we can. We keep a weather eye . . . '
Excerpt 2 • Opuss № I