B.N.Moore

So I'm sitting on her couch in Brooklyn on a Wednesday morning, eating a bowl of cream of wheat out of a shallow porcelain bowl and staring numbly at the TV remote control when she comes strutting out of the bathroom wearing a black thong and matching bra; and this is to say nothing of the contours onto which this apparel impartially wraps itself. I catch the valley of her waist silhouetted against the open window as she slips by me and over the threshold of the bedroom doorway. Again I find the remote within my gaze and regretfully pick it up, pleased to find the familiar soft rubber buttons beneath my thumb. I know the layout of these buttons as I know the details of her flesh and without even looking I turn the TV on. The volume is low, and I can just begin to make out the depth of a landscape as the vacuum tube warms up and mute colors assemble themselves beneath its dusty parabolic face. Beneath the window, over the sound of the morning news, I hear the mechanical sigh of a truck as it meets the crest of the hill; its driver, with the slight raise of an ankle, has involuntarily adjusted the pressure on the gas pedal, allowing the weight of the truck to coast past her house to the light on 3^rd Avenue. I get up from my seat deep within the soft couch cushions, leaving the TV on, and walk to the doorway of her room to find her disguising her smooth, dark flesh with a deep blue dress that appears almost black against the cool gray light which leaks in the windows beyond her bed; there, her pajamas lay intermingled with her flannel sheets, which appear to flow in sinuous cyclical waves with a wool blanket, like some sort of geomorphic upheaval - the strata revealing that her clothes came off long before the covers were thrown back.

The cool air in the room has mingled with the warm moist air wafting in from the bathroom, and a few beads of condensate have begun to track their way down the window pane like jagged forks of lightning. Through this brisk air, past her deep blue dress, beyond the condensate upon the cool glass window, the distorted street beyond reflects my own disconcerted perception of our relationship. We're in the same room; on the floor between us lie only twenty-four slats of tongue and groove hardwood flooring - our positions relative to each other are clear and measurable. In a vacuum, in theory, our bodies would be physically drawn to each other by a force of gravity proportional to our individual mass'; perhaps my love for her could be explained with such mathematical precision. I tell her that I'm drawn to her because of laws of physics beyond my control and she laughs; she laughs and smiles, the back of her parted lips sliding against her teeth as her upper lip curls closer to her nose. She laughs out loud and looks at me with eyes that see me as I've never seen myself; the stare is uninterrupted until she has taken four slow steps eastward and placed her mouth over mine - at this point, my eyelids drop and I realize what my eyes will never see.

From this position, I can smell her clean, warm body and taste her mouth. Hours from now, these perceptions will be stored in a matrix of neurons; her face will no longer be a discernable image, but a combination of non-linear and distinct stored senses; even as I write this, she is three thousand miles away (but it may as well be three-hundred thousand) and even as I struggle to imagine her, to recall the curves of her flesh and the thin wisps of her black hair, I can only come as close as a vague outline. Like some preparatory drawing for one of Michelangelo's figures for the Sistine Chapel ceiling, I can only imagine her unfinished; without the final product at my disposal, her image changes in my mind. I idealize her proportions, exaggerate her breasts in mannerist whimsy, fantasize about my body (which I can still see) next to hers... and remove any sort of originality - a creative process robs her of her essence. I can't capture her in my thoughts any more easily than I can capture her in my arms; she's elusive, yet beckons me onward.