by Todd Brendan Fahey
June 21, 2009


"You've aged really well. Different than I thought. You still have those eyes. ...I've still got my nose," she laughs.

It's a laugh that is she. Never, in this incarnation, will she know how beautiful she really is. Such is not in her to know. It's something she gives away with her laugh.

"You've put on some weight--"

"You've thought about how I'd look?"

"Oh, so often. You know. Fuck, we were insanely in love with each other."

I made some motion to say it's alright, that there's no point in tracking back.

"Yeah. We've both done it. With me, it's that...goddamned perfume," he smiles, gritting his teeth. "And old Genesis."

"Ripples." They say it together, and find themselves laughing. Together. Love is a vacuum, in which nothing else survives. It is a complete laugh.

Stan smiles, just happy to have made the trip.

A dark beach near campus, '84; green windowpane in gelatin. The moon draws the ocean far out, the sheen of sand a blank sheet; time, a carpet across the sky. It could all end here and all would go on just as it is. A shattering thing. Plunge in, swim far out to sea, to not come back; sit and listen to the pitch and ebb of the waters. Whichever. All were here, have been, are, will be, from ever and forever more.

Why not just sit.

She kisses him fully in the mouth. An ancient thing, the collision. She was there, and now we are here. From really wanting to sleep to being under is a stride. The suck of a wave, the wash. Like breathing. The press of her lips a language of intention, insistence. All that had timed out, or been interrupted, waylaid, not given license to, rendered malem prohibitum, all that had kept him in limbo for so many years, now freed. She is not going to stop.

He casts his tongue across her teeth and upward to the flesh above, and she makes a sound that is from memory.

"Uhn.."

"m'I love you."

"m'I know." Grounds her knees into the cushions, astride.

His lift, lodge.

Another resonance, this one not from a place retained. "Doo...you remember coming up to the 10th floor, and we'd sing 'Pigs'...huuh..."

"Stay with me, Sharon."

"Hu...m'trying."

Unclasps his mouth from hers, holds her hips down tighter. "I remember everything. The color of your bedspread; the animals you kept on it. The smell of the staircase up to your room came to me in a dream one night, about five years ago. We're not there anymore."

"H'fuck," a breath coming as from runner in the last legs of it. She has never been here before.

"Stay with me."

"H'on the street that night..."

"May '85. I didn't see you; I felt you."

"That was so weird." She is settling down a bit. "I hadn't seen you in two years; there you were. Honest to God, I didn't know what to do. What did I do?"

"You jumped up off the street and I caught you."

That laugh again. "My friends thought I was insane."

It could end here and still be ok. He will not be disappointed. Like in an NDE--the light and the assurance and the seeing again of persons dear, and then drawn back to the body. Still a very beautiful thing to know; and it will all happen soon enough, anyway. Why not just sit.

She kisses him again. Different this time. It says, Thank You.

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