#divisadero

All my life I have loved travelling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behaviour of the other. It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle’s form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.

As if this collection of things is what she is. So we fall in love with ghosts.

She kissed his right eye, then his forehead, then his mouth. He accepted everything. Her hands on him. They were not kissing now, it was more intimate, their faces staring at each other, almost touching. A breath, no words to accompany this, only watching each other's naked response. His tired eyes alive upon her.