It’s Not a Line We Cross

But now a line’s been crossed
Our intuition lost
where yellow orchids bloomed
The land is scorched and doomed
We were both here and gone
We rode with cruel deceit
We took the moon at dawn
The stars fell at our feet
But now a line’s been crossed
Our intuition lost
Where yellow orchids bloomed
The land is scorched an doomed

I dreamed we were standing by a vast waterway on a grand avenue lined with trees in glorious full bloom. The air was cool and comfortable, but the air was heavy with something. Something that hung heavy in the sky. I told her it looked like a fairytale sky and she told me it was the real sky over Tibet and that it was her real sky, not the way it was seen in our country. She told me to stay out of her sky and I told her that she belonged in her sky, to use her sky, because we were here on earth and on earth we shared a sky. “If there were a million flowers in my sky, I would taste every one of them.”

This was our love in those years. I would spend hours in that love. I would try to remove every line from the picture before me. I would try to write it into existence. I would create even a dust spec of this love in my mind so that there would be no room left for anything else. I would crawl into her love to try and escape the rest of the world and just be a part of it. My self would feel somehow erased. I would see that I was the friend of my own self and I was a part of me. “It is a little bit of everything that I need to live.”

On a late autumn evening, we were crossing the street on our way to a bar. I remember very clearly looking up at the sun and thinking that its angle across the sky seemed wrong somehow. I remember thinking that somehow it was a shape missing. It had fallen out of the sky. We both had a feeling of dread in our stomachs. I asked her what she was thinking, and she said, “I have a feeling that we are not alone here.” We walked on and the dread increased. We looked at each other and held each other’s gaze, but said nothing. I looked down at her and we both knew that we wanted to kiss. We didn’t kiss because there was a bit of fear in our hearts. A feeling of wariness. A sense of not wanting to step over the line. That line, I now see, was not so much a line but a spectrum of ever-shifting emotions. A haze. We could look up at the sky and feel dread. We could look at each other and feel love.

At some point, we both broke. She said, “Let’s go now.” and I said, “I don’t know.”

I remember feeling a lot of things at once. I remember feeling surprised. I remember feeling terrified. I remember feeling sad. I remember feeling the pressure of the feelings and the need to deal with them.

:: 09.04.2022 ::