Tag: love

your room

VERY WELL THEN, I’ll make up your room. Yours can be on the first floor. The house is never completely empty, but you’ll have your own entry way, your own door. I’ll give you your own key. The room will be fully furnished, in fact you’ll never suspect that it ever belonged to anyone else or was used for any other purpose. Your room will be as cozy and warm as cozywarm can be, there will be a soft, broken-in, long and lovely blue couch that you can fold out into a bed, and shelves lined with books from any writer who ever wormed their way into your heart: Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir, Anaïs Nin, Camus and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

There will be an old-fashioned floor lamp in the corner that you can turn on with the tug of a chain, and a pot of sweet peppermint, camomile, or fireweed tea that has been steeping for ages, and yet whenever you take a cup, it’s always at the right temperature and is never too weak nor too strong for your taste. This will be the little room I make up for you in my heart. From here, you can come, go, and inhabit me. You can put your black stockinged legs up and stretch out, set your tired hands behind your sleepy head, drowse and admire the wallpaper.

on assignment

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.