fossil

Remembering a kiss that cut my lips, I taste tequila and blood. That tangled fervor, fire smoke and sea air, a collision of bone and limb as I held you by your hips and hair. That native urge to devour encompassing every thread of intent. Your flesh radiant with the residual sunlight, glowing beneath the hot press of my hands. Salt on my wounds, the grip of ice spilling from the hidden starlight, echoes of the ocean grinding fresh sand from so many lost stones. That one moment when you were most.

There is little evidence left. A tattered photograph in a dusty box, a few cards and letters imbued with every essence of passion and belief. Chains of bitter strangers strung out between us. A series of constellations and collisions. Dreams more real than the sorrow that waking brings. The harrowing brevity of that journey from enchantment to bereft, the mirror not even holding a clue to this inevitable transformation.

These lost passions, do they sink into the sediment, awaiting the drift of continents to reveal their ossified remains? Do they resonate so intensely in the senses that the ache of their absence, the repetition of their honed impermanence gain them the huddled passage of ghosts, to stretch and creep in wheels of spent feeling in the dark stretches and the lonesome places? As the only proof of experience crumbles, as memory bleeds into fiction, as history becomes myth, what traces remain as matter steams into new and graceful states? The exchange of breath and appetite, this ancient grasping we wore the way any soldier wears the Iliad, the way all water carries the word. The overwhelming flavor of a moment where everything was possible.