The Craft of Her Love

  I stood in utter illusion, lost and without direction or discretion. Bold by reason of insanity, clinging to the warmth of the hand of a stranger. Redundant personification of passable hilarity. "Why not," she asked, connecting the dots between questions and query? "You're old enough to think," she said.
  "Yes, but I'm too old to know," I responded. We both wondered what that actually meant. We parried this way. One step forward. That way. One step inside. Closer, holding a candle to reveal the depth of the shadows lurking beneath our toes. Slipping and sliding into the maze of conflicted confusion, I kept banging into myself. I heard echoing laughter bouncing off the hall of mirrors, stunned by the vibration of a vibrato refined, I became transfixed in the light from her eyes. Held fast in the heat of her power, reshaped by the craft of her love, a perfect reflection of a life come undone.
  Had I become a wax figure or one made of blown glass? Or perhaps a frozen-in-time TV impersonator honed as if by a sculptor, cold and alone, sealed from the outside?
  Then I think, she sees what she wants to see, finds the way in, sets up a home and begins to settle in. Holding my breath, waiting for the end, trepidatious, audacious, fallacious. "I have to have you," she whispers earnestly. Red flags appear through the top of her head. "I want you all over me." I shrink into a magic school bus colored with a multicolored pen. I dehydrate into a tiny shape devoid of the water of truth, petrified solid, cold in my ineffectual debate. Protest with words mistranslated through the air. Restructure the engine of direction misunderstood in pointless revision swaying unsteady driven by rebellion.
  We are not the same though she thinks we are. She sees what I can do for her but calls it what she can do for me. No second guessing. We do what we do, trading spaces, fading times, reflecting on moments bent through these time sensitive transitions.
  How could it be any other way? She leans in that direction and I lean in this. Clasping our hands or making a fist, we collide in emotion wishing for better knowing it doesn't exist. There is no failure. There is no hate. We stand together on the edge of the promise of just one more kiss or one more miss. "There is always love," she said. But...
  No one ever told us that love wouldn't be enough.