Cold December Rain

In the dim light of thick fog, I reach for the moon and fall short.

The scent of damp soil, the hardness of stoic earth, rises from beneath my feet as my boots make tracks on the forest floor. I can see the little lights coming on in a string of small houses dotting the woods.

Electric candles, crimson Christmas ribbon, holly branches, shaggy low pine.

I was born in the dark of the morning, into the darkness of a kind of perpetual evening. This is what they told me. And in my innocence, in my eagerness to mean anything at all, I believed.

To believe is a way of holding onto time. I fold my soul into a sheet of paper, bargaining with chance, crumbled in the bottom of the pocket of my black wool coat.

One of the falsehoods we carry with us into adulthood is that we are only worthy of love if we try hard not to break it. We break ourselves instead, as protection. Melancholy. Spiked. Reckless. Bones like steel and hearts like fire, foolish, fevered, desperate.

Our hands on our chests. Our empty legs, like the slim bare trees groping toward the white endless sky, spread wide apart and glistening.

Expectant.

He reaches for me beneath our warm winter blankets. We lie naked and join together, moving in swivels of curled hips and feathers of touch, until we become the rain which streams down along the grand windows all around, prismatic, the translucent pale color of tears.

His hands trail over my arms as he presses me deeper into the soft mattress. There is a kind of silence that swallows a body like death, a welcoming. The vacancy, the heaviness of slumber.

Of escape or eviction.

Beneath his heavenly pressure, I slide into the blank darkness of sleep.

Every star in the cold sky above us

still out of reach.

.

Photo by Lea Dubedout