Wednesday, October 12, 2011

The End Set: iii/III



I have thought of someone for several days now, even dreamt the sort of dream that conjures, just for me, a new delirious proximity between the two of us. Dreaming aside, he is taller than I am. When we greet one another, we smile standing apart. There’s always a pause and then he steps forward so that I might lean up close to kiss him on the cheek. He brings his hand to my waist, brings me a little closer to him. This happens just out of everyone’s sight, around the corner by the door. Then I enter the office and he follows. I can feel his fingertips touching my winter coat. And if our hello is kept at a distance I’m unhappy until he has kissed me. For days then I try to keep the kiss with me, until that evening when I am given a new kiss to carry.

Such desire and excitement is formed of longing for a new dance. After that summer I left my underwater bedroom for a honeycomb bedroom (none of my furniture fitting against the slanted walls, such a difficult hexagon). My friends arrive with beautiful pot plants for the hall and another friend arrives for the evening with an arm full of flowers. At the kitchen table Andrew and I write of childhood gardens: buddleia, hollyhocks, nasturtiums. From my honeycomb in the roof, I have the perfect vantage point. I can see each wasp, each orchid and all of Olympic London’s cranes. Sometimes I count the cranes before I fall asleep. Other times I am content just to know that they are not innumerable.

Now watching the street from my hexagon, I say to myself, all I want is the approach, a little new dancing. I hear Marcel recounting, « Pardonnez-moi mon indiscrétion, mais vous avez un long fil blanc qui pend dans votre dos » - ‘Excuse my taking the liberty, but you have a long white thread hanging down your back’ and I say to myself again, I did miss the approach, I did, I did.

Old dances were held high above each of our cities, a thousand feet above everyone else. One summer held in your arms under the vines. Two beds pushed together in the spring. Arm in arm on the garden path. You knelt at the edge of the sea.

Now sometimes it seems that certain kisses fall somewhere between staking a claim and claiming what you consider to be already in your possession. I dreamt of a composite new person last night, formed of old precious matter and new excitement, equal parts water and pollen, something like honey, something like rain.

Best is when he is with someone in his office and he’ll wave and smile at me through the window when I arrive. So I’ll sit at my desk, check my email. Then I go in to see him later. He’ll stand and I’ll shut the door and then go close to kiss him on the cheek and to be kissed by him and now he puts both his hands on my hips and his kiss falls close to my mouth. And then we talk about work and he gossips and I leave.

Yet after longed for hours alone with him, contrived, ‘perhaps you could help me with some of the details’, a glass of wine or several, I grow bored and drunk as he talks. His hand is on my thigh now and I watch my dreamt, composite person unravel as he becomes only a man of his own making. It seems that my excitement hangs by Marcel’s imagined thread and in the end, this comes to nothing as such longing for my old life supersedes and replaces all other longing until it is all that there is.

But some things are inaccessible and that’s all you can say about them. There is still the same happiness and then perhaps there will be something else. In you walked, one summer night in Brasov and I saw the outline of someone I had adored long before in your long arms and legs. Now there will be something different. Something has grown besides the old precious matter, dreamt in the years between us, the two of us standing apart. Anna and I were dancing in the kitchen. There are pigeon insides all over my bedroom floor. A jam jar is held underwater. This then is my end set.