#withmillimetersbetween

To the one in the waves,

It was happenstance that we heard this song floating between us at all. Over the guiltless rushes of wind, the roar of waves breaching around aching ankles. In that burning sunset, we fell drenched with orange light and salted seaweed. Shadows rippled down your arms as you faced the horizon away from me.

I barely heard the calling cacophonies of charming songs you hummed beneath the surface, vibrating in time with the pull of the currents that barely touched me.

The breeze echoed the winds I desperately missed from home across the sea – those faraway mountains invisible to this coast, this beach, this picture of you and me and the velvet clouds above us.

This air, thick with sodium that stung our eyes, carried the sweet nothings we chirped to one another. This suspension from time we both craved, a vacation born of a longing for sea-salt libations.

I stepped closer to you, watching the water climb up my body as vines creep up brick crevices. I couldn’t look at you – despite the effort which your beauty demanded – instead reaching for the painted altocumuli before me. I could taste the phantoms of rain as those clouds dribbled farther away, much farther than either of us wanted. My palm collided with your shoulder first.

You glanced at me, pulling a lofty smirk from somewhere between the arriving stars. I finally beheld you, the splashes of this sea mixed with the violet light dripping from your brow bone into the inky pool swallowing us.

We melted with the water and the sky and we became the very glistening palatte we admired.

What languages swirled between you and me – between our fingertips, between whispers reverberating from the heaven we were overwhelmingly part of?

We remained close; our bodies pulled closer under the crystalline mirror by the will of forces we couldn’t control. Life rippled from us, this epicenter we didn’t create but nonetheless blossomed within. Did you feel those vibrations when they departed?

You and I stayed side by side in that lasting moment, completely and unwaveringly composed of science fictions we had not known before and are unlikely we will know again.

How lucky we might be if we did.

Ultimately,