Watch Her Body Move (audio)

Trash TV in a fancy hotel room. The sun glittering across the ocean outside the floor-to-ceiling window which opens to a lovely balcony on which we made love last night underneath the brilliant moon. The beach still in my hair and the salt on my skin.

I’m over the summer but it will not end. Too many expectations and not enough recklessness. He soaks in the tub as I watch two plastic girls I do not know fight over a plastic man I’d never care to. He gets a spray tan and cheats on someone. Now the tears and the eyelashes all come falling down.

The mess is all around us and now it is inside.

We share towels at the pool and pass our illnesses around. Coconut oil and painted toenails. Chlorine and cancer in the sunscreen. We protect ourselves and ignore the rest because it’s all come down to survival, baby, that’s it and that’s all. From behind my dark sunglasses, I watch her body move as she climbs up the ladder and out of the water. I was eighteen once and it almost killed me but I was too young to know it.

A little wooden sail boat floats by off in the distance. Life in slow motion. The sigh of a sweet wind flows through the silence.

We drink lime and tequila and walk back and forth across the faded words ‘NO DIVING’ painted on the tile on the walkway to the public restroom. Bleach and flip flops. Soap, sanitizer, air-conditioning.

After everything we have been through, all the horror and breathtaking brutality, this is where we land at the end of the killing season. The one the color of aquamarine like a perfect sea or a hospital gown.

I’m sorry I yelled at you so hard it broke your spirit all the way apart. I’m sorry I can’t seem to keep my shit together when the world is ending. Shoulda figured this all out by now but now keeps moving and nothing changes toward the better long enough to catch a breath.

This was supposed to be the time of my life. This was supposed to be a kind of transformation – some sort of new beginning. But I’m too tired and the circumstances we have been prescribed are far too petty and cruel. And God, how ecstatic a distraction he can be when things are rolling right along.

He emerges in his beautiful tanned nakedness and pours the wine. It sparkles a bit too much but I make do. He dips a finger in his glass and lets a drop of the crisp crystal liquid fall along the shape of my neck. As the heat of his tongue, the warmth of his closeness melts into my body, I am imagining a steamy rain forest soaked wet and slung deep with thick fog.

The sky was white like linen just hours ago and now it is orange-yellow like a candle flame, hot to the touch. I imagine, I imagine. Or is that your skin when you lie beneath me and glow in the dark. I know something isn’t right but try to swallow yourself into sleep.

In the morning, I go down on him because that’s when he likes it best. He tells me I’m a dream come true as I make the bad coffee because it is free. I wrap myself in a bright short robe and step out into the early morning sun. I wonder who will leave first, you or me, or if we’ll go together.

Eggs and toast and abandonment issues. You and me and everything we could have been, drowned in chemicals because we thought we knew better than anybody what it would take to make it out of this alive. The baby with the bath water or whatever that fucked up saying is.

Love and leisure, violence and sex and our favorite filthy mistakes to the sound of soft waves curling upon silken sand, thrown by the wayside in a toxic rush.