The Eloquence of Touch

In this house, the eight of us live immersed in words, witticisms, and all the abundant pleasures of the mind to which one might aspire. There is so much talk, so much thought rendered audible. Volumes upon volumes would fill themselves in electric succession, should some greater power ordain the transcription of our days.

And yet ...

All of it hushes to the quiet of spiderwebs teased by a breeze, when skin to skin I converse with one of my loves.

The briefest caress can disclose more emotion than all the words searched out and sought for by a thousand poets assigned the Sisyphean task of tolling with poesy's bell the full measure of passion and affection and want and need and desire.

Her hand upon my shoulder.

His lips brushed to my cheek, fleeting and fair.

One hip gracing another.

Hands pressed palm-to-palm, each finger to each, all in mirrored alignment.

Connections of the most profound elevation, whether chaste and pure or ascending to the perfect land where eros reigns in heat and fervor.

These communications say so much that we can never with syntax and vocabulary give permanence to their meaning. Try as I might, I cannot tell the true story of today's most particular kiss, or yesterday's tap of a finger to the tip of my nose.

We live these tactile expressions, and then they are gone, enduring only in their contribution to the suffusing spirit of this home, these lives.

Would that I could reach out to you now and with a simple, gentle moment of contact make real for you what I have been trying here to wrestle into words.

Gratitude

 I am so, so limitlessly thankful that we have come back to one another ...

That mistakes of a now-vanished decade are not unrectifiable ...

That my expansively love-filled world has so readily welcomed and heart-healed its one intolerable contraction.

A part of me does ask, "How much more right might the wider world be, had everyone been apportioned a bounty equal to mine for which they might be thankful?"

But when I look at her, lying in such warm and wondrous slumber beside me, the morning sunlight at play in her golden hair, I cannot be toppled from this dais of permeating, comprehended grace -- this awareness of all my fortune and how far at bay it keeps the worries of mundanity.

I exist in perpetual regard of the gift she represents, granted by the universe unto me and unto all who know her.

Thank you, cosmos, for the bliss that is my Heddy.

Basking in a New Photogenicity

 Another set of pictures mischievously inflating my ego ...

A New Look

For anyone who'd been anticipating the outcome of my recent posts sans the latest, here is a glimpse of me now.

I'm rather pleased with these.

Old Flames and the Idiocy of Misapprehending Failure

One of the great loves of my life inspired this lofty bit of reminiscence a few years back. In between then and now, I've occasionally reread it -- sometimes growing inordinately pleased with myself for its various turns of phrase; other times casually steeping the fibers of my soul in an idyllic marinade of nostalgia.

She read it, late last week.

I can't conceivably impress upon you the magnitude of that sentence. She read it.

More stupefying yet: the day after she read it, she was here.

We spoke. We touched. I beheld the lines of fourteen lost years upon her face, none of them able to reduce her beauty to so much as one iota short of Aphrodite's. We explored together our reasons and reasoning for the absurdly enormous mutual mistake -- the things she would not admit to herself at the time and the things I would not contemplate deeply enough to reconsider in the years since.

And all because, when I admitted in rather red-cheeked mortification that she'd been naggingly and increasingly on my mind of late, the man I love said, "If you're really that anxious to know what became of her, why don't you try getting in contact?"

It was so easy to do once I summoned the courage.

We fit so perfectly back together the moment she responded.

And now I have, again, in my life, something I should never have let go of.

She loved the post, even though she laughingly pointed out to me the parts she said were "horseshit." She loved that I had written it, that I had captured in such keenly scintillant prose at least a fraction of the monumental truth of us. She loved my favorite line most of all.

She loves me, still, never having stopped -- just as I now understand I have never stopped loving or needing her.

When we took her to the airport this afternoon, it was not to send her home, but to send her temporarily back the life in which she's contentedly waited out the last fourteen years. There are loose ends there to tie up. Somewhere around fourteen days from now, she'll return and stay.

But even with the width of half the country between us, we aren't apart, and won't ever be again.

Which is probably why I can't figure out how to end this post, I suppose; it's a post about something that's refused for fourteen years to be over. I can't possibly contain it in just a few paragraphs.

All right, I'm going to go and compose about a thousand emails to have waiting for her when her flight is done and she takes her phone out of airplane mode.

Waiting

I find myself beset more than slightly by impatience and inconvenience.

These are, for the most part, novel emotions to me -- or at least rare enough that I can turn them over for examination and feel that I'm in bold and uncharted territory, if also in a realm of itchy anticipation.

There's an amusement factor in observing one's own childish foibles, although I suppose the drollness may serve as a bulwark preserving my adult self-image. Oh. Look at this silly part of me, this little nugget of immaturity, insecurity. Isn't it cute? Obviously I'm not remotely in danger of letting it spiral me into a fit of infantile pique.

How much leash should I offer this mood of desire thwarted by the sluggish progress of days and events that stand between me and that which I find myself craving with more and more wanton abandon?

Clearly the answer is that it does not matter. The wheels, gears, and cogs of the universe shall turn as they will, and no measured biding of time can make them run faster.

Has contemplating this set at ease my restless temper by even the tiniest damned bit?

No. But I suppose at least that the ten or twenty minutes spent spinning these thoughts into threads and skeins has put me ten or twenty minutes closer to that which I impatiently await.

Changes Gather ... Like Clouds Breaking Open by the Light of Dawn?

We've taken a step here that tips at my long-contented and (I thought) imperturbable self-image. Read back a few posts for a glimmer of what I'm talking about.

I'll have more to say, I suspect, in a few weeks.