A Slow Fizz.
We used to speak to each other. Whispers, only for ourselves.
I could spin silk out of the base of my spine back then. You said it was disgusting and beautiful.
We would hang from the ceiling, ecstatic, scared, weightless. Watching the night slip by, sharing our small sounds. Murmurs, the susurrus of sheets, snorts in our spun sugar hammock. A chorus strung together with muscle, tuned to lungs and heart.
This was how people were once friends, this is how we fell in love. Sticky, suspended. No one else needed to know, nothing else mattered. We built chrysalis cities for ourselves that would soon disappear, dismantled by dawn. This face was only for you. Below us, screwed up quilts rippled, tail lights flared through windows, sideways satellites, the low setting of an AC window unit humming a solid E major, ephemeral and forever.
As if summoning an ancient, unwritten language, I try to pull it all back into the present. I cling to the taste of chocolate and sweat. My eyes are closed, I’m ready to be anything but I feel like nothing. Ice cracks in a glass of seltzer beside the bed, settling down into a slow fizz. It’s 2:30am and I’ve totally forgotten how to sleep.