I'll take the pictures if you stay in bed...

And I'll take the pictures
If you stay in bed
I'll run down the park
If you put up your head

Don't put up your borderline

Four or five years ago
I wouldn't believe it
I wouldn't receive it
And I'll take the stitches
You put in my head
I'll run down the ark
If you put up your head

Don't put up your borderline
Don't put up your borderline

(genius cred--Sufjan Stevens)

I would nearly venture to say that this is the song of my life. It haunts me and seduces me, smooths me out and stirs me.
It transports me back to Italy...and warmth...and train rides...and a heart on the mend, shard by shard.

*

The first time I realized that you would let me down was cold January, four years ago. I lay feverish and alone in my basement apartment, and I needed you--your fingers like cooling ice on my cheekbones and your scent in the air. You weren't there and I knew in the oblique spaces of my innards that you wouldn't come. That bit like a bonfire through my veins.

Cut/ resist, retain, revive--spring's first streaks of gray, and a faded wooden shack of a cabin. Clear Lake. You and I and the neighbour's dog, walking for coffee in the newborn sunlight down deserted gravel roads. Layers of musty clothing (your grandfather's? your sister's from faded years ago?). We look homeless and we could care less. There is nobody around except for us, as if this humble village of cabins is our own private universe. Back at (our makeshift) home, we brew honey-flavoured tea and shoot it with whiskey. You make dinner, green curry, while I dig myself into a corner of the ragged couch, afghan-clad and book in hands. I break to sift through the tattered collection of records your parents still keep strewn away here--Cohen, Mitchell, Dylan, Young etc. We agree on an old Serge/Jane compilation, and their voices twine around us; twining us together, buttery-smooth. The lazy/sexy sounds melt us into themselves. You lock in with my eyes across the room, this twiggy space between us, and smiles radiate; softness. It is an undeniable exchange, and the heat is like liquid static forming rivulets from me to you and back again.

Once we have devoured our meal of heat and spice, we lay--curry-laden bellies-down--on the chipping slats of the verandah floor. A Scrabble board stretches in the middle of us, filling the gap between our bodies. At first it is serious but then I start inventing words (salinla--a rare type of Balinese worm) and you draw your pipe out from some pocket, somewhere. The sweetened smell of tobacco smoke drifts around us, hanging like a spidery curtain in the dark air...and we have forgotten about our game.

Later, we run down towards the beach, so still and void of sound or movement, you trailing after me. We align ourselves there, in the chilled sand against the water, and then we stop talking. You are in your own thoughts and I in mine. But we are irrevocably joined there, alone in the last dying moments of winter. For the next trailing period of time that we sit there, breathing in the sharp beauty of it all, you only open your lips to say these words--"We should probably never leave here."
"I know," I reply, and lean against the warmth that is the righthand side of your body. It's cold now, and I feel it.