SNAPSHOT
I look around this room, full of so much youth. We are already flowered but budding new limbs with a tremendous ache as we reach to become more. We all have certitude in our still-new bodies, yet as I weave through the room, listening, each of us emanates uncertainty in every word uttered. We are all performing training exercises, practicing a victor’s confidence through facsimiles of champion conversation. Life’s relentless assaults on body and mind have not yet filtered into our collective lexicon of experience. You and I, however, have lived life beyond our years…tethered by guilt, lashed by convention, and apprehended by the blood searing our very own veins. Even though we are both only in the second decade of living, somehow, I know that, like me, you are not so untouched by life. Others practice knowing what they do not know, but something about being here with you now tells me that we will soon face truths we’ve long tried to drown in turbulent waters.
I’ve learned in my time how to be a true champion of nothing, a tenuous champion of everything, and how to bear the torch of strength through measured breath exhibited only by a statesman. It is this torchlight that has long attracted you to me, and I sometimes wonder if you have begun to confuse me with the sun. In spite of efforts to stay distant, I know now that you cannot help but lean toward me in pursuit of that which you need, and I to you, even if to others our convergence seems a betrayal.
I watch you from across the room, your mouth moving, smiling, your eyes bright as you casually engage with a group nearby. Your eyes have darted away from mine several times, waterbugs in retreat to safety. But I watch you as I speak to others, or moreso, as others speak to me. Your fluidity never fails to captivate me. A concentration of litheness in a single figure, your body has gestural movement. You are a stroke of charcoal articulating across paper, a ribbon of long grass bending effortlessly in the wind. I see the muscles in your arms, shoulders, neck, and jaw maneuver gracefully with every expression. You know I am watching. Then you turn to me, eyes stopping at mine. For once you do not look away, and I realize that you have finally embraced careless intention, that in this gesture you are opening a window for me to enter.
The casual smile on your face washes away as the tide of my gaze moves in, wetting the ground, hitting the rocks with cresting intimacy. I now see you motionless except for the rise and fall of your chest; I can tell that you are overcome, that you are in this instant here with me only, in this room full of people as they become distant, dissipated ghosts falling away.
You once told me you loved TS Eliot, and I knew I captured your fascination with his words at the ready. That was then, and now I cannot help but think that, what is actual is actual only for one time and only for one place. I know you will never forget this exchange at this time, at this place, as it marks the start of something new, something honest, something raw. I feel urgency in my chest, as your eyes are breathless and steady with excited punctuation, full of the fear, reverie, and anticipation of a wild animal engaged in the solemn act of stillness. Our gaze is an act of passion, and we both know, too—a conscious act of love. You part your lips but do not speak. With a look, we both know what is to come for you and me, inevitable and unavoidable libertines. I sense that if I look down, for the first time I will see that my feet do not touch the ground.