Under the Skin

lWhen she leaves my sheets fold up into a ball and the pillow becomes inconsolable. Unable to fight time I try to embrace him as a friend. The hours I try to fill with distraction, but they often become too big to even fathom. While I hang onto the minutes the clock, like some evil metronome, mocks me with its ticking. Down to the seconds is where it can be managed. They become my children as I name them: Turtle, Puff puff, Avery, Red, Spoony, and it goes on from there.

She has made me like a coal miner traveling under the earth and chipping away at the ground. The dust will seep into my lungs if the ceiling doesn’t come down over my head first. Only someone completely mad with the idea of her silhouette in the doorway would continue to cut through the rock and dirt like a Looney Tunes character sawing the limb he stands on. She was like cancer if it put on a dress and danced around the room.

But what other scenario was there? Become infected or live in grayness, tear down the walls or put up wallpaper. Have my eyes seen too much. Have I become so cut off and burnt to see truth before me? And when I feel the warmth of her teeth and lips formed into a “u” with her cheek muscles pushed tight why don’t I welcome it completely instead of waiting for a coma followed by a “but”. To feel like a fanatical holding a metal rod in a lighting storm is irrational when the sun is shining. In a sinking boat does one poke another hole or add a patch? How can you tell which is which? If a life without risk is not worth living how is the unexamined life not as well when the examination is too much risk? But when your breath stops at the ring of her call or when the only moment you feel right is in her arms and when you are not it is as if you have never had water or air, or never seen an empty field at the days end, or never felt the ocean between your toes, or never fought in the trenches of youth with the red headed Jones, or never tasted Todd Richards duck confit with currant reduction and quail egg, or never sang road house blues in the hideaway Max keeps behind the carwash, or never snuck two sips of Macallon’s 25 year scotch, or never wanted to believe in something that may not be. To give life to something with the smallest sliver of hope.