THE INTERVIEW was somewhere in the countryside. The photographer said that she would take me there herself. She drove a black SUV, the make and the model of which I didn’t notice and I sat in the passenger’s side seat. The car was clean if not new, the interior was comfortable. I sat back and glanced in the side mirrors as the car traveled through the northern forests until these gave way to a series of green hills, pastures, and distant silos.
It was a very gray day that day, there was fog everywhere. It felt as if the sky had descended to Earth. “Are you sure you know where you’re going?” I asked her. “Of course,” she said, glancing in the rear view mirror. She briefly licked her lips. They were very red. She was my age with blonde wavy hair and she had on a red blouse. I could just see the slope of her breasts through the material and I observed them carefully, for she was a no-nonsense woman, and I didn’t want to do anything that would set her off. We had worked together on a lot of assignments. She took the photographs and I wrote the articles. She made the images, I made the words.
Somewhere off in those hills, she turned onto a gravel road and parked the car. There was fog all around, floating between the trees and lurking in the runoff ditches. The sky was a milky cloudy abyss, but I could hear birds crying in the nearby woods. I said to her, “What are we doing out here?” She said, “This,” and leaned in and kissed me. “I see,” I said. That might have been the last thing I said that day. Soon she was consuming me. Devouring me. Drinking me. Imagine all that. I thought that I was such a big strong man, but I only slipped and cascaded into deeper levels of vulnerability. Then I felt myself inducted, encompassed, engulfed, swallowed up whole, mind, body and soul. There was a restorative tenderness in her and she held my hand and led me to it, all the way back to the little silver blue spark at the end of the tunnel. It glowed bright with love brilliance. I dissolved. “We both need this,” was all she said.
north! 