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Sparkle (0)
He pushed me up against the tiled wall under the hot stream of water. I could see his face in the pale light of the moon coming in through the window over us.
He kissed me and held me, wet and hot, against his chest.
“When I look at you, you’re still so new to me,” he whispered in the silver light. “But when I close my eyes to kiss you, I recognize you.”
“It’s because we’re the same city,” I said.
I don't really know you, but my essence recognizes you, Tristan.
My cities of the interior are made of the same cobble stones, the architecture is strikingly similar, the walls are constructed of the same volcanic rock, and our alleys are equally narrow. You are a part of the inner city that was divided from me, perhaps in siege, perhaps in famine, over the course of history. My streets, with numbers that seemed to go nowhere, and so often met dead ends, find their sequence when I line up against you, and the dead ends become paths to other places, places inside you, which until now had also been incomplete.
THE ABYSS
The abyss. You know what it's like. You can taste it even before you come around the curb. It tastes like the rushing speed of oblivion, missed deadlines and meetings, a truce to regret and no thought of return. That's me at 180 miles per hour, heading straight for it.
I believe in living—but living in an organized fashion. Lovers have a place, and this place is not all over one's life.
“What are you going to do?” my friend Melissa asked me.
“What must be done when my heart does not oblige me,” I replied, pulling a suitcase out from under my bed.
APPLES
Malus. That is the family name of the apple tree. Apple trees are known to grow in temperate climates. They can grow to be thirty feet tall.
According to legend, Newton was musing in a garden when he witnessed an apple fall. As John Conduitt, his assistant, described it, "It came into his thought that the power of gravity (which brought an apple from a tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain distance from earth, but that this power must extend much further than was usually thought."
Love. It is said that love is a thing of the heavens. Relationships are forged in heaven. But they must be lived on Earth, must they not? Earth is bound to gravity, making it a hostile environment for things like love, which are susceptible to such forces. Everything that goes up invariably comes down.
To say that one has fallen in love is to say that one has fallen up. It is an incomprehensible remark, but perhaps purposely so, as love is an assault on the senses.
During my first year of university, I lived in a hotel. Apartments were scarce and I didn't want to live in the dorms, but my school had ended its off-campus housing program due to issues of liability.
Two years before I'd arrived, a balcony on which two lovers were indulging themselves collapsed. A free-fall from the eleventh floor. Though she broke every bone in her body, the girl lived. They said the boy broke her fall. He died on impact.
That's love.
GOODBYES
"I'm leaving tomorrow," I whispered into Tristan's neck.
I was straddling him, naked on my bed, my head resting on his shoulder.
“Where?” he asked. Then he checked himself, “no—don’t tell me.”
“Would you follow me?” I asked. I shouldn’t have. But I did.
“I might try. How long are you gone?” he asked.
“Three weeks.”
“Jesus,” he said. “To do what?”
“To write.”
“I’ll be gone by the time you come back.”
I wondered if I would stay if he asked me. He wouldn’t ask me.
“You have to go,” he said.
“I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do,” I said, kissing him. “There’s a choice, there is always a choice.”
If you seek to fly through life, you must be weightless. To be weightless you must accept two things: that you must go alone and that everything is a choice. There is no such thing as fate. There is only choice.
“You have to work.”
“That’s not really the reason I’m going,” I sat up and looked down at him.
“Why are you going?”
“I’m going to get away from you,” I said.
I’m going to save myself. I’m going because if I don’t, I’m going to go in so deep, the only way out of him will be through him and I don’t think I’ll make it
