Xyla's Apartment

Inside her, we move as one, sparring toward the bright abandon. It flees and we follow, faster, find it! Further, we journey together, just there.  The strong fervent final upstrokes of release yielding to a quavering absence, like a high white room, then we are back in Xyla's apartment, uneasily present, inside our own flawed and knobbled bodies once again.

If the body is a temple then the sanctum sanctorum is the mind, unless you're Xyla, and then it's there in that hairy patch between her legs.  Her langorous eyes shining like hotel soup spoons.  We kiss deeply, warm together like the fertile earth beneath a gray blanket of sunlight.  There is no way to know everything about someone and so I don't try very hard. Imminent dawn is my curfew. "You can sleep now" I say.

"I won't" she refutes, closing her eyes, hugging the pillow.  The daylight dances on the meadows casting shadows off the spindly windbreaks as I drive home, the earth turning toward the sun in all it's fucking majesty as I pull down the sun visor and stop for drive-thru coffee, black in a quaint paper cup.  I pull around to a parking spot beside Commercial Real Estate Available sign and watch, the northern sky white with smoke, and momentary terror eclipses everything then passes.

Chipped a tooth on Thursday.  Took a big handful of popcorn and off popped the cap from the front of a left  molar.  What's left is sharp and my tongue has been fixating on rubbing it all week, as has my mind.  I yawp into visor mirror to try to see it, pulling my lips back at the corner with a hooked finger. It's in the back of my mouth, so even if I smile broadly the empty hole cannot be seen, but I'm very aware that its there, even if no one else is, and it makes me wonder about people, y'know? Like, what pain and sharp nagging chips are chirping around in some people's tortured minds behind their otherwise smiling faces? What secrets are the others are carrying?

"How was your trip" Cassia pips, her sly white slip a revelation against the dark gray of our kitchen backsplash tile. "I saw the fires coming in" I say, setting my suitcase rolling and running a finger across the spotless island.  The kitchen is immaculately clean, the dishes sorted in intricate yet coherent patterns, starched towels folded crisply and smelling faintly of coriander and ripened plum.  Obviously I haven't been home all week.  She pecks and swipes at her phone, pecks my cheek and skirts off to the bedroom to finish getting dressed. Work today.  The stereo plays Debussy.  So bright and fucking chipper. I turn it off. Toss my receipts towards the wastebin and miss.  She emerges fully dressed, her hair tied up like an extradiagetic halo and brushes to the door.  "Welcome home.  You should sleep now" she says.

 But rather than mope around and study the meticulous tidiness of the house I coif up my hair and drive in to work. The sky looks sullen, threatening, a wreath of smoke around the parking lot and corporate walkways so slyly designed to reinforce law-abiding behavior and discourage loiterousness and vagrancy. I swipe my badge a few times before the door opens and the foul wraith is there waiting.  Late sixties, purple spots, with a decaying cloud of hallitosis perpetually fumigated by eau de toilette.  "I thought it was going to be a bad day.  Now I know" she grins contentedly as I elbow past.  "What's the matter," she asks, "did you lose a tooth?" My inbox has seven hundred fifty unread emails, enough to read two daily for the next two years. Tuna sandwich for lunch gets stuck in my tooth hole for the rest of the afternoon. The clock seems unhurried, licking the grape juice off the fingers of the second hand as it steals my life away one tick tick tick at a time.

News said fire fifty percent contained. Then the wind kicked up.  Cassia texts that she is going to her sister's to help and I leave her on read.  So thoughtful, telling me where she is, where she is going.  Go over to Xyla's apartment again.  It's in a complex coherently labled A through H, all four stories, all slyly designed boxes with intricately overlaid modulations of color, a façade to fool the eye into assuming modulated variation exists within their pre-fabricated internal blandness.  Flat windows overlook a flawlessly manicured lawn with three walkways around the worlds most sterile playground and a gated quartz azure pool.  Numbered car ports.  "If he only asks you out on the same day he's just not that into you," she quotes, as I leer at her naked hips squeezing back into faded jeans.

    "I'm here aren't I?"  We pass the blunt until I can feel the color of blood squeezing in gushing beats into my cavernous heart. Her bathroom is disheveled, slightly funky smelling, but in a girlish way. The shower drain has a corona of her hair sopping up the suds as I scrub my skin so hard it bleeds.  When I emerge into the gentle light, I note that the air now smells smokey.  Like a campfire.  Outside the wind howls and moans, demanding payment.  My naked reflection in the mirror is mournable.  What natural disasters we hold within us.

I had watched couples in the airport, like an anthropologist, wondering what women see in men. Most men. No, all.   Building a lasting relationship is about the careful management of information, about making sure that someone knows exactly the right bits of information to think you someone still worth hanging out with.  Fraud, basically. Perpetrated by each of us with two Y chromosomes, each scheming pyramidic two balls and cock wrangling their wily ways into acceptance until the structure is too tall to crumble at the rotten revelation rocking the foundation.  I licked at my chipped tooth and my eye strays onto the women.  Women. What whigmaleeries make fraud look exciting.  

Imminent dusk is my curfew. The day fades on the drive home as earth turns from the sun's energy and I stop for drive through coffee, black in a quaint small cup.  I pull around to a parking spot beside a spindly tree to sip, and watch, the sky a nautical depth of blue. A deer in the still arable meadow across from the neon mini-mall.  The bank empty save the red tailights queing for the ATM.  It's money they have, peace they lack. 

    "I wish I lived by the sea" Xyla had said once.
    "Why?"
    "Water in that quantity brings purpose" she said.
    "It's a senseless world."
    "The sea speaks to me."
    I asked in an affected bard "what doth the seatide say unto thee?"  She smiled.  But her eyes were somber opals. 

Smoke. It fills the car and chokes it's way inside my head in the lessened visibility as I my lower window to talk to the officer blocking our street.  I tell him that I live here.  His demeanor bleeds with righteous ostentation.  "Get your things and get out.  We've got an evacuation order."  The street is empty, the house is locked. There's nothing that I need here so I grab the rolling suitcase I'd left packed that morning and two beers and head out.  The sky over the hill is bright and hot.

One reaches an age when one has met the limits of certain assumptions and no longer need entertain them.  They no longer hold sway. Cassia always just knew that things would get worse, with an unswervable certainty that I couldn't dislodge. I always suspected that things might get worse, but might not.  After three years together there was no need to discuss the merits of her belief, much less argue the logic of it against my vague and increasingly unlikely assumptions.  Her righteous firmament was foolproof, (somehow I always ended up playing the fool) her arguments were slyly designed, intricately patterned, joylessly lengthy, flawlessly coherent, and scathing.  My rejoinders were full of whiney"but-what-ifs."  So I call and am relieved she doesn't answer.  

I drive south, drink the two beers and drive, the wind at my back, the windows open, smoke wending out like steam from a coffee cup.  My tongue diddles at the vacant tooth. One little corner of the earth burns. There is so much more earth turning dumbly under the stars. I drive and I call again, and again, and drive, the highway spooling out before me until the last of the smoldering smoke smell has been long blown away.