He felt fenced in by the construction din. Summer -- the season of repair. The roads redolent of cracked winter lips, all moisture drained. A new layer of asphalt glues the roads together for now; they'll shrink next winter, splitting again in late spring from the waves of heat that hover close but are unreachable in front of our eyes. Everything holds for awhile. Not much is meant to last. We emerge from the cold dark into a few months of loud preparation for what will eventually come undone. So I stay awake and watch the hours of lingering daylight that don't exist in the winter, and I listen. For awhile, the surgery stops. The streets make space for sound in the summer; the hum of silence does not get stuck in the thick snowbanks. We stay still. There's nowhere to go. We're all a little worn down too. In the day's final hours we think of how to fill the gaps in ourselves.

They had reached the point in their relationship where it was time to share with each other. "I constantly feel like I'm living at the point of the exhale when it's time to breathe back in again", she told him. "Last night I nicked my balls shaving", he replied. She told him that sometimes her desires surprised her. He said that there were several cartoon animals that turned him on. They continued like this for hours, bartering back and forth, trying to find a way for both of them to understand. Exhausted, they retreated to the bedroom. He flopped on the bed with his clothes on. She undressed by the window, watching the blinking lights of a plane disappear behind a cloud that was lost in the dark. Crawling up beside him, she whispered in his ear, "I think I'm falling in love with you." He was already asleep. He dreamed of being dried by the sun on the crest of a wave -- high, and suspended above ground.

“People don’t post pictures of themselves crying on Instagram,” he thought to himself. He realized this as he flitted through a crowd of rehearsed smiles, brooding stares, casually flexed muscles, and clever displays of cleavage. The territory of the “sobbing selfie” was his to claim. There was much to think about. Which filter would make his tears sexy? What angle captured the throb of his biceps as the pain pummeled through his body? The sudden death of a close friend provided weeks of opportunities for the unveiling of a trend that would surely catch on quickly. As he convulsed in his room one night, feeling as if he was choking on his grief, he walked into the bathroom to take a mirror shot. He had never watched himself cry. He was unaware of what sadness did to his face. Disgusted, he tried to contort his feelings into something more fashionable, attempting to form a more desirable expression of sorrow. He couldn’t get it right. Each shot was uglier than the last. Exhausted, he stopped sobbing. The small lens of his phone was wet with tears. He turned the phone towards himself and took a photo — a blur that didn’t show much of anything. “Perfect,” he muttered, uploading the picture.

Terrified that one day "push" might indeed "come to shove," he made sure to stay away from anything obviously precarious. Curbs, the edge of pools, mountains; these things were easy enough to avoid -- their attendant perils fixed, and visible. But there's a cliff at the edge of comfort. And he chased her love -- a mirage of infinitely renewable affection -- to its secret precipice.

Guilt

The torrent of guilt coursed its way through the final minutes before sleep. As he waited to feel tired he often dreamt up conversations that he might have, with friends, familiar faces, stranger. Often his scenarios bored him and he'd switch out partners mid sentence -- speed dating for the introvert. And when the conversations were finished, the failed raconteurs muted and gone, he would feel shame for the way he didn't let them finish, for shutting them up in exchange for another creation with nothing to say. In sleep he'd find the solutions to his scripts, and by morning the guilt was ready to picked out of the corners of his eyes and flicked aside. He had to make room for the next day's deluge.

Return

When you're young, returning home after an extended trip feels like entering a new space, as if the house too was on vacation, and has rushed to settled back into its role as it hears you approach the door. The home, that cradle of comfort and reliance, has shifted in your absence. The house is empty, the hallway dark and everything quiet and still, the rooms being filled again with voices and footsteps. You aren't disappointed. You're charmed by the unexpected strangeness. Nothing physically has changed in the home. You've just forgotten familiarity, having become accustomed to brief stays in foreign places. Knowing that the sheen will soon dull, you walk through every room, and you turn on each light and look at the objects and their formations in the room in a curious way that will vanish with the scrub of morning light.

A-L

And that's how I see her -- fading into everything. She makes the intimidating sky familiar, and imbues a well-known room with the energy of chance. Spaces conflate, and I never feel anywhere but with her. The peak of a pine tree; the threshold of a den; the mercurial land above us -- your love blends.

Photo by Kristian Jordan: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dawntraitor/9232333467/