Deep Purple Night, Bright White Day

He wasn’t aware she was a virgin. When he put his hand to her belly, he wasn’t aware. He could feel her in-breath, then—he breathed as her. When he put his hand to her jeans, to the part of her jeans that were her crotch, to the front part of her crotch, he didn’t know what kind of thing was there beneath. Was waiting for him. Had been waiting for him. He didn’t know the contours of its mush, the weirdness of its beauty, the flushed hue of its responsiveness, the rushed compression of its sensitivity. He wasn’t aware she was a virgin, as he collided once—apologies apologies—with her teeth, with his teeth. Just the once. Then softer, more careful. Like to an elfin soundtrack. Like gods were watching.

There’d been three beer between them, and these they’d shared in privacy. Private from law and filial law and safe from the prehensions of any being or thing outside the two of them, their small club of two, their restricted membership—even the whispers of trees they evaded, or built in. That had been in the bushes, outside town, bushes often seen from a highway and rarely seen from within, where things like branches and insight could prick you, and when you wouldn’t care.

There’d been three beer between them, but this had not given him amnesia, had not made him forget the meek supraskin scent of bundled nerves and pink life. Or that she would whimper a little when he pressed there with the tip of a tongue searching beyond itself, for the joy of its being, for the unified ecstasy buried as birthright in its ontology—looking, the tongue, to collaborate with mystics and criminals, with Jesus and Judas, on the road to awe. A cup of liqueur as reward in an infant laborer’s mouth. Here. On an edge of whatever kind. On the very edge. Right before slipping.

There was much to which he was not privy. And much to which he was. He knew the sound of the color of the sky. He knew the privilege and downturn of his inheritance. He knew that here would be a beautiful seamless outpouring of all carried as yet inside, between two who were to become not two. He knew the hardness of the floor of this post office in the earliest verve of morning. He could hear the thin click of her misgiving and tension both, thrumming unbidden behind her lips. He registered that he could love with his fingertips, and he learned where that love was wanted.

He saw in a moment how to nothing withhold, and so doing felt in a moment a closeness to that which had always been close, the great dark, just for a second, and then another.

And when she met him there he opened his eyes the way all kids do when they experience their first intricate liquid conjoining of body with body, being with being. How wide his eyes did open.

To be human is to be divine. To be divine is to be human. To love is to be human. Here is love. Will you wait for this? And waiting, with no idleness in you, find it?

And finding it know that you’ve found all there is. And as all there is, live.