i like to tell stories : Twenty Years & An Orange Eclipse

I sat on the orange couch next to her. Having never touched her before, and wanting to, I put my arm around her, around the small of her back and just past her hip. My hand fell on her thigh. I left it there. Time passed and I was not asked to remove it. I moved my hand slowly and found a tear, a rip, a hole that fashion had placed on her jeans on the top of her thigh. I suddenly felt bare skin. I liked it. I caressed it. Time passed. I kept caressing. The world had stopped while I felt her flesh for the very first time. Suddenly without warning, she stood, she said something I cannot recall, she hit me, I saw a tear well and then she was gone…

I went back to my room of dark and sat in there, not seeing anything at all but more dark.

I never saw her again, I never spoke with her again and I never heard anything about her, again.

Then out of the clear blue sky, I noticed she had seen me electronically in a place from afar.

So I sat down and I wrote her, described to her, and apologized to her for what I had done, felt and recalled.

From the moment I first felt her flesh to when I wrote this letter of apology, was exactly twenty years.

She wrote me back in exactly 30 days telling me she had no recollection.

Seven months later I found myself in a place not far from where she was.

So I blindly invited her to meet me for a moment, a photograph, a something, an anything.

She accepted.

I bought her dinner and we told stories until our hours in that place expired. She invited me into her chariot without a ceiling and she floored it into the desert. We bounced in our seats through the wind as we stared up at the dark waiting and wondering when and where we’d see the stars overhead. There was an eclipse this very night and the moons brightness was hiding so many of those stars. The shadow of the mountains grew larger as all unnatural light faded, leaving us in the glow of reflected sunlight about to be extinguished by the shadow the earth makes. A shadow we can only see on a night only like this one. She pulled over turning up the heat as we sat in her chariot without a ceiling and as she stared upwards I stared at the sunlight bouncing off the moon bouncing off of her and all around. I put my hand back on her thigh where I once again believed it was suppose be. She looked at me, smiled, hit me again, only now she laughed and then looked back upwards. I kept my hand right where it was and I squeezed, hard, over and over and over and never wanted to let go. I told her exactly this.

She turned up the music and never stopped looking up or out for the stars.

I never stopped staring at the sunlight reflecting off the moon reflecting off of her.

In these moments, only here, only now, I didn’t let go of that thigh.

When she returned me to my chariot and before I exited hers, she gifted me my first forever machine looks at her.

I made one of that thigh with her hand on it right where mine had just been and told her, repeatedly, thank you and may I make more?

Forty-eight hours later she met me in the desert again only this time, in the blaring, direct, no longer reflecting sunlight.

She wanted me to teach her how to break things so I taught her, quite well.

When breaking things was over, I gifted her a present so she could always walk around lost in stars and they would never again be out of her sight. All she would have to do is look down at her own feet in most any kind of light, and that reflected light from below would show her what she wanted the night of the eclipse I couldn’t give her.