Keep Me Where the Light Is

It makes me cry, she said with her eyes tracing the brownblack swirls on the desk. Do you ever cry when you read a book, she asked.

No, never. There just books. The boy answered this so quickly, so surely, that for a second she forgot the charms of his smile.

Why not? What if they're sad? Tell me you cry boy, make yourself real to me, vulnerable, make yourself real to me, cry, cry, be sad, there are so many ways to be sad in this world that you're always going to be sad in some way, beautiful boy, if you're broken I can be unatatched, I can be broken too, pretend, pretend.

Because I'm a man. Again, a swift answer, grinned off his face, a trophy answer, pride.

You have never read or seen or held something so beautiful and yet so awful only to realize it was only yours for a moment, then it became someone else's beauty someone else's awful, its beauty and it's awfulness is what makes it yours, it's so like you, so beautiful and so awful, so great and terrible, it cannot possibly belong to anyone, yet you want it, desire it, lust after it, ohgod, you have to have it, and that distorted not-anything-like-love feeling, well you've got to have it too.

She wanted to make him understand about this book and about so many other things he wouldn't understand. But she couldn't, he wouldn't ever know how the book had left her. Like a kite that realizes the sky and the wind just aren't good enough to fly in today she relished in her new vaugeness, her unsure childlike precociousness, ohgod ohgod ohgod, she needed him, a kite needs the wind...to fly. If only she wanted to, she didn't want to fly, crashing was far more glamourous. Can you feel the ground when your head's in the clouds?

Of course you are. She laughed into the thought of his arms and their names carved side by side on tree trunks. She laughed because she was comfortable.

She laughed for all the times they would never have.

Another clean getaway...