15th
Headwaters and Saltflats
That moment when the clouds in a sunset toss off orange and turn purple, a shift from major to minor; it reminds me of the start of something.
I remember sitting in a room with a few girls and a boy. We were working on something together and he threw an empty pepsi bottle across the room and into the trash. It was an unlikely, smooth and perfect shot. I watched him recognize that as the girls made approving noises, and then we pressed on with our project.
But his expression after the shot! I watched, fascinated, as the sentiment lingered around his eyes and maintained a tautness at his lower lip.
With shock, I realized I wanted to cause that expression, to play with its intensities, to pattern a path through his sensations that he’d never find alone. So it was long before I’d admitted to myself that I wanted to sleep with him that I’d wanted him to rely on me to feel more.
There is a certain eroticism in stripping away your own defenses before your desires stand before you: naked and expectant. But I didn’t plan for them to be standing there like that, awkwardly waiting for me to acknowledge them. And if he didn’t reciprocate? I wanted it all to melt back into some lake of ache that I could leave out to dry.
We never held hands. We never touched, maybe he knew what I wanted, perhaps he could feel me searching our worlds for emotional loopholes to knit into something warm for us both, brash as orange, absurd. And so whatever it was that started, it unraveled, like an overstretched metaphor with the links and objects all confused. And then all the orange was gone, all I saw were the colors of bruises and all I felt was something like longing.
And I think of this during sunsets like the one above. The photograph is taken from a bus of a dry salt flat, not a lake!
