nook & cranny

it’s dawn and outside a little bird trills. between the cocoon of warmth and the kiss of winter, between tragedy and ecstasy. do you pass unannounced?

ii. heartbreaking

inanna shed everything to descend.

iii. each and every

peace is a window sill, the echo of distance, the world a spoon full of everything, tasked with the work of filling an ocean. peace is the footsteps left in the sand, watching the clouds dissolve. memory and amnesia. peace is the love you whisper to the departed, the soft falling grief, silence, clear and bell like.

iv. golden hour

writing, not to explain, but to feel the subjective I and you disappear. the subjective self and other dissolve. ‘I’ am not defined, and neither are they.

playing an instrument, feeling the ache of being alive. listening to someone else play, feeling the peace linger.

dancing with another, the synergy of moving together, the polarity, the way you attune to them, the way they attune to you, the way the world dissolves into a blur, the way they become your clear point of focus, something in you flows into them and something in them flows right back.

skin contact. hands. a hug. an open heart.

Deep in my own heart, I felt seen. And I treasure that like a gift, not the act of being seen, but the act of seeing beyond the mask.

There is a camaraderie I don’t want to lose. Not all crushes need to turn into anything. Some can remind us that love, in all its guises, sometimes burns like a flicker. A moment in time, however long it lasts. Love, not the Neptunian kind, but the kind that rises and falls, ascends and descends, becomes and fades. Arises and dissipates. Venusian. Love, because this person you have a crush on, made you feel seen, made you feel alive, tended to a place in you, that was in ruins. Whether they know it or not — this person who made life, beautiful, however fleeting a heartbeat, or long, an entire phrase, the whole song, several songs, an evening, whether it turns into anything else.

A crush is such a tender thing, like a winged little bird in the palm of your hand. You confess, and the little bird takes to the sky, with no promise of return.

There is nothing logical at first glance, about being drawn to the darkness, the unknown, memory as a landscape that I cannot seem to fully inhabit. But I am drawn, regardless.

Is it that something of my own nature resides there? If naming it runs the risk of having to un-learn a paradigm, an attempt at imposing order, not naming it leaves it perpetually unknown.

The liminal is what I call it, the way it encapsulates orientation, though not as a sense of direction. There’s less a choice than a kind of resonance. Liminal, by definition, is not point a or point b, it has no ground and no anchor.

Perhaps, because the logic of being drawn to something that is meant to reside out of frame, out of view, is something that takes years to unfold. When the path is muddy and you detour, trek through the bushes instead, and then other hikers appear, going the other way, one of them offers assistance by way of asking you if you know where you’re going. You smile, eyes carefully pinned to your next steps as you say yes, I do, not without a little effort, and the humour of the situation lingers and then trails you a little.

The question lingers too. Do I know where I’m going?

Anyway, Solnit, bless her, brings the abstract into concrete language —

the firmness of your grip accents the quiet in your tone.

heat steals its way up the column of my throat at the way you look. you want to see what teasing me all day does to me, or rather… you already know.

shadow and candlelight flicker over the walls, dance across your face. something blooms softly, like the way an artist takes a moment to appraise their work. perhaps, because your brushstrokes are made of desire, reverence, restraint.

your fingers part my pussy lips and apply the gentlest of pressure over the hood of my clit. a breath shudders past my throat and the tension in my thighs melt away. i strain and tilt my hips forward, ‘please.’

— Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

The beauty of melancholy is that it attunes to what has been lost long before it becomes coherent in language. But loss can also be confounding when the loss is not simply absence of presence, but also a deep sense of betrayal. Not merely that the other person has crossed a point that neither of you can return from, but what that crossing means. What rupture, what hope, what meaning, and, innocence was simultaneously eroded by it. There is an abstract-ness to the loss, when it is the loss of a dream that never had the ability to take root, because the two dreamers were both, in a way, wounded young adults.

Words can express a to b, and still miss the emotional signature.

But to want to create art, anyway, is to lay a gentle hand on her, to not deny the existence of it, to reveal the truth. The truth that aches. The truth that is gentle. The truth that is soft. The truth that we did not survive the experience unchanged.

To hear the truth is to sometimes have permission to cry.

i don’t say it, but i think you would have enjoyed it, overstated too.

words have a way of becoming metro systems, sprawling in different directions.

but that was an hour ago.

frankincense lifts from my skin, oil and sweat and the roiling ache of desire. you let me find the rhythm i like, running your other hand along my body, and the proprietary touch turns me on as much as the way you keep me suspended, blindfolded, at your mercy. existence re-arranges into control and surrender, you tell me you have the patience to wait, that it’s fine if i don’t want to beg, that you have no problem, leaving me exactly like this.

you murmur in my ear as you untie me, ‘the only way you’ll disappoint me, is if you have an orgasm without my permission.’

and jupiter will tilt you into euphoria. you’ll find your way home on star dust and melancholy — signal fire, a wire from somewhere beyond, formless coagulation and eternity was always lingering on the edge of the page.

ii. 12:18 am, moon over the bay

tell me about psyche. quarter past midnight, what is her story? without the ‘moral’ of it. just silence descending like a gloved hand, and held in its palm, far past ballroom hour, every dreamer’s soft luminescent body.

iii. 12:27 am, dancing

teeth and shadows, shattering. maker unmake me, beneath the veil of dawn when she comes. beneath, we’re falling and aren’t we always? in some way or another, you bite into fruit and taste sweetness.

iv. 12:30 am, eternal marathon