sidedish, tall and tasty

he got me.

holy shit, he got me.

his blue eyes, self-consciously cropped, chocolate-spattered facial fuzz, slow and syrupy smirk tipped slightly toward me to make contact over their heads, got me.

and he was right: it would hit me harder than it does daily him, because i'd dismissed the possibility. but, o, i could have fallen into bed. and, o, i thought i'd kiss his enticing mouth.

so, now, existential crisis for late springtime 2006, panging for a time when i had the freedom to fall into a tent with he who told me saturday i looked so good gripping the handles of that chair, calling his attention from afar, with he who never told her that he propped my leg against his shoulder and thrust hungrily into me, so we would later exchange knowing glances over her personality-less, bleached-out head as he pretended to be wholly consumed with her graduation festivities and not wistfully recalling a time of freedom that represented more for him than it did for me. later, drunk, he called and yearned for my own drunken glory, my perpetually absent inhibition, and i wished i had been there, wasted. i thought i had evolved beyond that.

i also thought it would be a full-breasted, dark-eyed woman who got to me that way. certainly not paradoxically arayan him, the wrong breed, but still perplexingly magnetic. certainly not with me as the hired help, not with me, farm-girl at heart, full of so much he didn't understand, so much i will never render comprehesible.

i told him weeks, months ago that cracks were beginning to form, that he needed to try to fill them before other elements crept in. he was not the element i expected would ooze into the gap. my persistence may be symptomatic of previously expressed desires, but, more probably, i gasped for air at the recognition of the throb because he evoked a deeper, unconsidered, rawer need and elicited an ache i've been too quick to attribute solely to him. i want, i want, i want. and what to do with that? i continue to be gauzily disloyal, driven by something i can't name, hiding deep in my denial.

land:marked

an almost four-month lapse.

still briefer, less complicated than an almost ten-year lapse, a gorge bridged readily by the same sparkle in her older eyes. she remarked on the youthfulness of my face. those sisters are my true kindred spirits, the only ones who completely get my backstory, the only five who really, really know. i came closer to her than i have to anyone in a long time. twelve brief hours. and how many years before we cross paths again?

she hounded me in the car returning from a glorious trip of accomplishment, intimacy and awakening. a trip that further excavated relics from my backstory, those sprung from earth, risen 6000 feet high, an altitude that never fails to elicit incessant gasping, awe. she needled until i tipped sideways, let the tears fall too fast for her to see, her eyes fixated on her path, unable to focus back on me. or herself. she created a chasm. ten years' separation and spontaneous renewal may not allow this crater's passage. she would not hire me; she would not trust me. or my disguised, welcoming hands.

here i am learning to appreciate the topography of my being the way i passionately promised, but allowed the vow to idle, in january. i am better than i think i am. and, anyway, the lines that define me help to keep me real, loving life with, not despite, my not-so-swollen citrus bursts, which, it turns out, are somewhat better than average, even given the size.

she wrote about his tortured tangle betwixt two distinct and conflicting universes with such eloquence; the way he finally found peace with his life, a satisfactory venn, surprised him, even as he reclaimed the name he'd so fervently scorned--his way could not be determined from without, could not be objectively decided, which is what she needs to understand about mine. even if predetermined, it cannot be predicted, by anyone or from any angle, least of all her colored own. my path with snake as differently from hers as the winding trails of fading henna dancing the curves of my body until the end, the drain. our ultimate end will be the same, but our odyssies differ amazingly, and, in spite of our persistent, gravitational connection (the darkness rising), she does not recognize this about me: that her experience can only faintly inform my own--we traverse two separate planes, poles, paths. o, but she is forcefully tenacious; she will have her way, if only because i limply opt to cease and desist, engage in more productive matters. like counting the clouds flitting past.

he never wrote me back. maybe because my discussion made him realize that his birth was commerce in its own right, maybe because he decided that our enterprenuerial relationship should have limited continuation.

i chastise in him what he claims man cannot control, what i realize i cannot control in my life; the dance between his masculine and my feminine is not nearly as straightforward as i would have it be. our choreography complicates my understanding of this shared dance and our individual spinnings, twistings; still, this always brings me back, explodes the big picture, dissolves the pettiness that threatens to dismantle our interwoven tapestry.

becoming redder today than yesterday, tent pitched in the yard, celebrating my moon, my essence, her powerful assertion that i can make life---i can make breath. that life would have been here by saturday. instead, he feeds tulips that should have been red, but merged with her yellow to glow vividly orange and surprise me. this month, life and breath are outside me, buried, sprouting taller in response to alternating glowing nurturance: by day orange, hot and radiating, by night lemon, cool and reflective, by me, pomegranate, furious and invigorating. we dance around each other, undulating, emanating, beating our secret marks into the ever-relenting, fruitfully malleable earth.