I guess that, when you get down to it, all it is is a way of talking about love and lust, about death and pain, about all the great and small things that scare you; and all without ever having to say the words out loud.

How else could I say it, after all?



We have the same song on repeat the entire time. Roger Waters of Pink Floyd and Van Morrison, and somewhere in the background you can hear a cast of thousands singing along. On the bed is me running my hands over a body hard and slender and lithe. In the dark her skin glows moonlight-pale and her hair is a curtain of night, a swathe of shadow in silk and lace.

My blind fingertips read a love letter spelled out in the bumps and rises of her shivering arms, and this is what it says:

Every glittering kiss red as roses, every lingering touch white as snow.

"I'm glad you got out," she says as she comes up for air. She inhales once more before slipping back beneath the waves, sifting it through her fingers like sand and Pixie Stix.

We save our lives in the most destructive of ways.

"I missed you ," she says from somewhere beneath me.

Me, deep below sea level and surfacing into the calm. Here, in the dark, in the white powder shimmering in beams of distant light, in signals riding a radio wave beamed out from the cold corners of the universe, the luminescence is glorious.

She leans up on her elbows as, trembling, I touch my nose to her sweat-beaded stomach and submerge myself yet again.

"How do you feel now?" she murmurs.

Like I'm diving through galaxies.

Breathing stardust as the chorus reaches a crescendo, I say, "Wonderfully, blissfully, amazingly, comfortably numb."