The Day, The Night

Her Voice

Her voice like a steel drum
The sound of the sun
Hitting water after noon

Quantum of Solace

You barely alluded to it, and on-camera we didn't even kiss.  But you awakened it in me anyway.  My love is like a gravitational singularity.  It is deep, invisible.  It is inconceivably limitless.  Once it happened, it was never going to go away.  It is infinite, and it affects everything.  And you reminded me of that.

"I have no armour left," you said the last time we were together.  But you still have that car.  The same goes for me (except the part about the car).  The better I get at sparring, the less armour I have.  I am lean.  I am an great force and power, even though my strength is greatly diminished.  I am extraordinary velocity, even as my speed has tapered.  I am a vector.  Continuous flow at all points on the line.

And for a little while, last night, we were together.

Three From Last Week

1. Barry.

Barack comes over for dinner.  It's more like a mid-afternoon sandwich that I'm overcomplicating.  I've got recipe books and I'm whipping together the most challenging tuna salad ever conceived while the man who is going to be our next president waits at my parents' glass dining table.  We're in the house I grew up in in ohio.  The countertop is still sunshine-70's plastic laminate, the floors that rust colored linoleum pressed to look like terra cotta tiles.  I seriously cannot make this damned sandwich work, and Barack just wants to chat, insisting that I call him Barry and we don't talk about politics or how inspired I am, and that keeps sucking me in, so I really can't cook.  Even though I'm a bit stressed about not being able to show off my fierce cooking skills to the person who is #1 on the list of people I admire, he doesn't really care.  He's just glad he doesn't have to shake a thousand hands in this hour, it's just him and me.   I keep worrying: don't you have to go soon?  "I can go whenever I want; just do what you do best while we talk.  I don't get to just talk these days."

2. Night club.

Professor has his own school.  At night, the back rooms, the ones we have the treadmills in, also get populated with bar tables and the whole thing turns into a night club, complete with blacklight and phosphorescent paint on the walls.  The glow of florescent pink, yellow, and green bounces off everyone's faces; when they aren't illuminated by bouncing light, they are in shadow.  Professor is almost always in shadow because he doesn't drink.  But the club makes money and none of us has more than a beer anyway, because we're all going to be training the next day.  There's a sense that we live here, in the same building.  My apartment is upstairs, so this is really like a living room that I make money off of.  I'm astonished this night to see my best friend in college, her blond hair cropped short the way it was in 1989.

3.  Special forces.

The army drafted me for a special forces operation, because I was so good at Call of Duty 4 and Bad Company.  The commander for this operation is John Kerry.  We are shipping out tonight and I am really stressing over it.  I am going to die, for sure.  I remind the almost-president that I don't actually know how to shoot a gun or run around shooting people; it's just a thing I do on the xbox 360 to have some fun once in a while.  He doesn't care.  "Once you get out there, you realize pretty quick that you will choose to live."  He tells me this in a disinterested way, because he already know that I know this, and that I'll do what it takes to keep my ass from getting shot.