january prose piece

I gaze out at the woman whom I know will leave me in death; I remain focused on the point where she stood, naked, 20 feet down the gray hallway moments ago. In staring off, she gives the appearance of passing through me when she runs, leaps on my body, her long, thin legs wrapping around me. My nipples are as cold as the morning's frost, and are cutting the clammy body of the woman growing out of my waist. My nipples are eyes that can see her bones, cold stainless steel, when my real eyes cannot, in their ties to light and substance.

When I wield my eyes upon her, they are lashes that deaden her mouth, and make her own eyes ghosts, trapped in the ethereal gauze of mascara and half-light. The throbbing of her inner thighs, a pulse for her syncopated thrusts, are bands of energy that channels my body's movements into a communicable language:

"Your repetitions only remind me that you were never here. They split the present into countless pasts and futures that will never become infinite enough to satisfy my hunger for your time away from me."

But she still stands in place, or was never there at all. The shutter closes on her, and she stays in my thoughts while disintegrating into gray skin, her eyes blue panes wreathed in mascara that drips infinitely into stillness. I categorize her further into the digital wilderness; it is the woman in the gray hallway that lies underneath the reflecting rainbow-gray shine of the back of a cd. I stare into it, looking for my own reflection.

My hands are filthy, work having coated them with the invisible skin of sweath and grime, written in the pores by the filthy water that washes away only what's visible. I spit into my cupped palm; it cuts through grease I had forgotten existed, slippery and cradled in black edges. I get started, shaping my panting with the mouthed words, "you were never there, you were never there," and she is no longer clinging to me: no more rainbow grays, no mascara ghosts. I come sooner than later and she's gone.