Walls

He dreamed he was drowning in the Pacific blue with peace on his mind and the sun in his eyes. He wanted to feel the sand beneath his feet and the cool salt in his lungs, but the ocean tasted like blood and he opened his eyes in the dark to feel her tears on his face. She was leaning over him with the moon on her back and for a moment he couldn’t tell who was who. The man in the moon is screaming where no one can help him and he reaches out for her but she disappears like shadows in the dark.

He doesn’t want to know that the words are a promise she can’t keep, a forever she won’t live through. He wants to hear her say them and pin her down like a butterfly whose wings have torn. He thought he heard them once, like a dream he never quite awoke from, but they tasted bitter and red, red as sacrifice. “I love you,” he called out, and thought he was dreaming.

He lay there with his eyes open and the Pacific far away and he felt his lungs squeezed tight and he couldn’t breathe and he was very, very afraid, but he would not move. If she was there, she would feel the sensation of his aching body move and fly away and then he would have nothing. He was used to her silence but he was not used to the taste of her tears.

In the cold white light of torturous moonlight he realizes suddenly that the room is no longer dark and there are no shadows. The emptiness pulls him from bed to window screaming her name. As he turns to search the room, for just a moment the cold white light has him trapped and the moon is on his back; the screaming is deafening in the house reverberating with silence.

*

She is listening to the ocean call her promising freedom but she knows it is a lie and she will never be free. The spray is on her face like tears like tears and the waves are hungry. Her footsteps are disappearing; she is floating like a ghost leaving no trace and she knows it is a lie and she will never be free. She can’t cry because of the gap inside between where she is and who she dreamed of being with gilded wings light as summer thoughts.

She has invisible burns from his touch and she knows that she will never be free. No matter how high she could hope to fly, she would always see his eyes, and the hurting in her heart was a millstone.

*

When she got back, he was sitting staring straight ahead. The gray of the sky was tinged almost blue and they both felt the threatening presence hovering near.

He looked at her in the dim glow of the in-between-times and though he longed to clutch her to him and hold her with nets or pins or cages, he knew that it wasn’t fair or right.

She didn’t come near him; they stood with all the distance between them and neither of them moved. She wanted to sleep, to sleep and never dream. And she is not afraid no she is not afraid but she hurts. He is watching her and watching her hurt and he wonders what went wrong and why they are sitting with all the distance between them and why he dreams of drowning when he kisses her.

*

They are lying side by side, not touching. He feels empty and his face is a mask because he is. Empty. Except for the feeling of all-aloneness that creeps around the bed like hungry fire. Consuming.

She is lying there, feeling his arms tight around her the way she always feels his arms tight around her no matter how alone she is, protectingly, comfortingly, like a childhood she could never grow away from, prison-like. The screaming in her mind is louder now and her head throbs to the hoofbeats of Apollo’s horses coming on so fast. The gray fades, her self fades, and the pale pale blue stings her eyes and she wants to sleep.