Were you not in love yourself once, friend? Did you not dance with your beloved in fogs of rose- and sapphiretinted smoke in a bar? Someone young  would play the piano and the keys of your heart with honey-sweet fingers. But for all this golden smut, was not your love just as pure? Did not your anticipation fill up like a sail, bulging with joy, carrying your boat invincible across the depths of Lethe? And did you not walk hand in hand with someone, from one court to the next in this enchanting hell?

You knew that your love was perfect, like all unfinished things, that it was hard like steel against the world, but on the inside like the inside of a mountain, with strange pathways up and down, known to only you, dark turns where you’d walk closely entwined like two dreamers, you with her hair over your eyes, her with the hot breath of your lips singing in her ear.

Now we have aged, we turn over pages in a strange book, and trust our lives in the hands of no one. On the rare occasions where we dance again, it is as if we step on glass with naked feet, and all the pictures on the wall turn away and weep.

We dare not even look each other in the eyes again. What if sparks would fly off the hot ashes – everything is so dry, we sit so carefully, scared of the last embers – what if our fingertips caught fire when we touched, and before anyone knew, we would lie deep on the bottom of each other, shivering with fever: how many things would have to change, then.

August, 2010