The air conditioning breaks and gradually everything shudders, slows and stops.
Movement suddenly seems like too much effort and you know everyone else feels the same because their voices halt their normal rhythm and nothing really gets done. You think this is probably how it would feel to live in the south a hundred years ago, sipping ice tea on front porches and watching the gentle sway of the willow trees, conversations a creep because there isn’t any rush.
You recline in your chair for ten minutes before you realize you’ve been tracing a bead of sweat trickle down her neck as she answers the phone. When she sees you, she smiles like lemonade in jars and the spray of a sprinkler and you know this could be everything you ever need.
&&&
You meet each other for coffee (you say each other because you always seem to make decisions in twos these days), and you poke fun at her for ordering a fruity drink with the whip cream, something seasonal that sounds gross, but she laughs as if you’re just playing along in her own joke.
Pumpkins already dot the front steps of some houses across the road, like yellow street signs telling you to slow down, breathe, relax. She’s not going anywhere.
You’re staying the night at Dwight’s farm that night because how could you not? and trying to figure out the best way to screw with him without getting arrested, but you’ll be in separate rooms because Dwight’s Dwight and he’s cruel like that. She doesn’t end up drinking the weird latte thing and you just give her a look that says everything and nothing and she giggles as if you’re filling your quota for the day.
You rake her leaves just so you can jump in them and feel her close against you and try not the think how in twelve hours you’ll be a million floorboard squeaks away from her, yet just down the hall.
&&&
You’re starting to fall in love with the way the snow flakes light on her eyelashes and how it sings to the perfect yin of the yang freckles on the pale of her skin. You can’t separate the pink of her cheeks provoked by the cold and the blush from your hands in her pockets and you’re discovering it’s all the same so it really doesn’t matter. On your lunch break you press your faces flush against the glass, letting the cold startle your senses and focus on each snow flake as it shimmers to the ground. Every frosty fleck around it grows weightless and just stops.
You kiss the top of her woolen head as you step outside and try to catch snow with your tongues until your mouths go numb and you’re laughing so loud that you don’t notice the cold.
&&&
There’s a lot of things to choose from, but you’re beginning to think that you’re favorite thing about this you and her is waking up next to her.
It’s the melody of several moments; her sun-soaked curls, her fingers flexing and splaying out against the white of her sheets, the green-tinged shadows of the tree just outside tickling her bedside table. It’s the breath she takes just before waking up and the first sliver that her eyes open to and the way that she smiles before she speaks. It’s not being able to see anything else until she stretches with a small yawn, her toes pointing towards the paint splattered canvas and the tubes of primary colors by your feet and her hands reaching high in the direction of the photographs hung above her bed.
It’s knowing that you’ll be there every day for her to wake up to if she lets you. It’s knowing that she will.
It’s remembering the first time you realized that you like eggs done the same way and that she does the dishes just after breakfast which is fine because that’s when you normally read the paper. She finds the stark text kind of depressing but she’ll read the comics with you, and a million little synchronicities just like that.
It’s rediscovering how you fit, pieces from the same puzzle and her edges making up for your gaps and vice versa.
It’s the feeling as if you could die in this instant and be content because then it would always be just like now, if you weren’t so sure it would stay this perfect anyway.
&&&
