A Story About Touch

A deep orange overhung the quiet room, a pergola of light to shelter us as our branches twined slowly toward each other. We stretched so slowly and yet too fast, as we knew the subtle metronome of our hearts beneath that silence could only count to the morning’s blue-grey loneliness again. I articulated my fingers so as to increase the distance to contact with that other warmth, to increase the already fathomless joy that would arise when skin and skin combined to yield a chimera planted in the serene garden of this everywhere room.

Even as I conceived this elegant arbor, my hand was still continuing onward, onward to the contact which would form its birth. The space between was narrowing, was becoming an ever more enriched womb to bear our love’s crescendo. Each molecule which separated us now fizzled, now spun merrily away as the grooved and sloped whorls of my pendant fingers pushed forward.

Now my fingertip could feel the coursing warmth of a fingertip that could feel my coursing warmth.

But as catharsis’s curtain was about to fall
And touch, the grandest of our senses made
A trembling vine o’ertook my bravest strides
And froze my movement with its hardened braid.

Twas fear that held me at the door before the dawn
That gave such gravity and yet such craven eyes
To the child of our simple touch
Which pure or farcical would soon arise.

Burning lamp of love’s first caress
Have thee hiding under thy auroral folds
A barb to poison every dream I’ve had
Of being held above the black of solitary cold?

It was as if the universe had nothing left to say to me. The orange glow surrounding us was Beatrice, was also succubus. Did it wish to bring about divine conjugation of these branches, hands in hands, and eyes in eyes? Or did it merely wish to grant me hollow freedom from a world I thought was formless night, but that held me closer to its pith than love in this arboretum could?

My thoughts were an inkblot soaking upward through the pages of this very story. How long had the blackness, planted, been creeping up the capillaries of its naïve leaves?

And in the midst of my mind’s writhing, an undulating heat penetrated my finger tips and turned the fiber of my being into one steady vinculum of fire. The gap had relegated its strength to the birth of our connection. Was it my unsteady traverse, or that of my companion, a flash of contemplation now visible as well above that birchen brow, that bridged the Arcadia and yet the Hell of that last moment?

A tender infant sapling sprouts somewhere in the pale orange of an artificial wood, with a shadow something like the disgust rooted now in our nervous soul.