Portal

Dusk falls in around the house, mellowing the quiet as a strong ray of slanted orange light streaks through the front window and bends off of the large mirror standing against the side wall. I’m curled into the corner of the couch making notes about some books I’m reading but my eyes are tired and my mind is hazy from a long day hunched over papers and screens. I hear you coming into the kitchen, opening the fridge, and my body eases, my bones relax. Maybe what we have isn’t always easy but there are times, unexpected times, but times none the less, when things seem so close to perfect it actually aches in my chest to think there could have been any other kind of life than this. You pour the wine and ask who I am writing for all this time, but the answer is not as simple as you might think. I write for myself mostly, but I also write for other people, people who are changing and evolving just as I am, all the time, becoming new, and then dead, and then alive again, new again and again. I tease my fingers through their distant minds hoping to stroke upon some kind of secret, something with depth, with teeth, something dark. What is in the dark is always honest. Closing up my work and tucking it away, I follow you out into the back garden and take a long deep breath of springtime evening air, moist earth, fresh cut grass, and a hint of lilac from the neighbors’ yard mixed with the smoky scent of burning leaves. Sitting upon your knee, I drink my wine and kiss you deep. You are all tanned skin, wild golden hair, soft lips, harsh beard, and light perspiration. A day in the sun is all you ever desire as I wait inside and pray for the gray soak of heavy rain. How often our lives are one thing on the surface but a whole mess of tangled wilderness underneath. At times this scares me about myself, about us. The thought of promising another access to all the secrets, some kind of entrance into the wide open, unexplored terrain within. The truth is, there are places inside me no one else will ever see. Not because they don’t want to or haven’t tried. Lord knows, how they have tried. But because they will never be invited in.