Simple

 

It was always going to be like this. One glance, and all the fires of the world gathered inside your eyes emitting sparks and signals all the way to the outer orbit but mostly lighting up the kaleidoscopes of my eyes, which, through some magic of their own, pulled up the corners of my lips into a triumphant smile of a yes, responding brightly to the open horizons of your face, leaning into mine curiously, warmly. When my arms felt the sturdiness of your shoulders (mountain sides bathed by the setting sun), and your arms entwined around the softness of my waist (long grasses swaying in the morning light), no universal force could have disentangled us. Our foundations clicked into place, our soft tissues and bony elements whispered their hellos simultaneously mesmerized and electrified, and all our mingled atoms, molecules, receptors and synapses flowed in and out, free, excited, unbound, attracted. When my forehead snuggled smoothly inside the nook of your chin, the notion of time dissolved into the shapes and pulses of this new configuration, which could have been there for minutes or for thousands of years, listening in to its inner rhythms and beats moving in ripples, in waves, in dance formations. Fluttering like a morphing cloud of swarming birds. For a moment, or a lifetime, no one breathed; we were in sync with the night sky, and the day sky, with the moon and the stars and the sun, with the ground steady under the bare feet. And then, as if stirred and moved by the inimitable force of you, my face lifts and opens (petal by petal), catches the sunrise over the ocean streaming from your eyes, then eagerly seeks and surrenders, and the air is filled with delicious anticipation about to burst into a myriad explosions, just like the instant before the cherry blossom unfolds, soaks in the sun, and comes home.

Instead

 

I could write about the long, dry fifteen years you’ve been gone

and point to all the cracks, holes, fissures, and crevices

which your exit slit open in the fabric of my existence.

That would be one way of remembering you today,

your absence gaping a little more each year.

 

Instead, I look at the two subtle, barely visible lines

on my forearms, just below the inside of each elbow,

which are yours (no one else in the family has them

except for my brother and me);

I observe a couple of small, faint brown spots

that have recently appeared on my hands,

now beginning to look like yours;

I comb slowly the silver strands, growing thicker,

in my hair near the ears exactly where yours were;

and when I turn my head to my left slightly,

I catch your quick, lively eyes shooting me

a glance of recognition from the glass

(you are always smiling in there).

 

But the best of all is when I feel,

with bare feet firmly on the ground,

how my anchor, my pull, my centre of gravity

attaches me to you and the long line before you,

keeps me light but rooted,

reassures me I’m safe and sound.

Vulnerable but with you somewhere

still around.