Untitled (prose piece)

The moon swayed against her bare back every time the wind pushed with enough vigor to weave her body left. Its light hugged the swell of her breast, swiveled down her side unevenly. For a moment, she was fully exposed in the paleness. Then the wind would rise up again and the broken pendulum would shift left like before, swallowing her body in darkness. She eluded both the dark and the light, unable to balance herself on the grass below her naked form. So she swung back and forth, left to center, dodging the shadows for the light before involuntarily swinging back into the black again.

She was used to this inconsistency; the artist in her could sense it from simple moments like this one. Everything became a metaphor once she acknowledged her thirst for one. She wanted to believe that her inability to stay still was somewhat uncontrollable, like the way the beads of a kaleidoscope fall with the slightest movement, like the wind that eased her sideways. So she spent a good part of her evenings on the grassy hill behind her house, rising and falling with each breath, swinging left to right inside of the evening's unpredictable beat.

This is the woman I fell in love with. A woman who defined herself by the world surrounding her, a woman who eased her way into the universe as precisely and delicately as I eased my way into her mind, into her open body. This woman was poetry that flowed in the perfect places-- her hips melodically dipped into her waist and rose up again, billowing into the fullness of her chest. Her eyes were the punch line that killed, that broke the immaculate curvature I knew so well. Sometimes, I'd find myself lost in her softness, wrapped in the overwhelming effect of such subtlety. I'd watch her write in bed, following her lips and her hair and her spine and her fingers until she'd catch me staring and stare right back, breaking her general sense of tenderness with something staccato and poignant. Her eyes reminded me that she had meaning; she had a distinct and riveting pulse. She existed beyond me; she existed beyond herself.

And then she fell in love with me in return. She let herself succumb to the warmth between us and melt, molding inside of my every breath. She abandoned each curve that she loved, slapped her arms lifelessly around my ribs, dropped the look in her eye that once kept me hungry. All of a sudden, her pulse walked in step with mine.

I was lost—slithering away from her on a buttery track that she had kneaded with her own hands. Each touch became a more and more obsessive attempt for completion; she searched my body with her fingers, frantically seeking any trace of herself in my skin. And as she slept, in her only gentle moments free of desperation, I realized that she had cascaded into the most beautiful loss of self that I had ever seen.