Bent to a Kiss in the Sand

I am watching you paint your hands black in the sand as your long hair falls over your eyes and your naked skin glistens in the sun. I am wondering if you will let me get close to you or dart just out of my reach like the stray cats I am trying to befriend in the alley. Every time I reach down to pet them, they twist just out of my fingers touch but secretly want my hands to stroke their shiny fur and warm bellies.

My mind keeps drifting back to you stretched across my bed with my hands running down your arms. All strength and muscles and hardened scar tissue reaching up over your emotions. Now, in this sun drenched place your eyes are heavy with the heat and slight intoxication. The waves wash the shore clean at our feet leaving bits of flotsam and jetsam to tell us a story of distant shores. There's a party going on somewhere in the background but I am all caught up in my mind too far gone to ever really be here. I'm thinking about your fluttering hands and wanting to brush the hair back from your eyes.

I have come to accept that I am the holy unwanted and have made a happy enough home in complete emptiness. I understand the importance of the alone and that we have been here before where you found my charms wanting. I understand my unattraction, my disease, my ugly distinction filling up the room with a palpable taste. I understand that I am the villain in this story. I understand my own inevitable dislocation out of your mind and spirit.

But I keep coming back to the vision of your eyes as the sun set and the moon rose. The rays caught in the depths of your irises; the scenery changing as we sat side by side, skin gently touching and fingers entangled. I heard your nervous laugh and settled against you in a moment of relenting to an unused sensory contraption. I have let touch pass me by for years, guarded my skin against errant fingers and suddenly I am finding I want to touch you. I want to feel your skin. It doesn't have to mean anything more but I want to feel your weight against me on this warm soft night of the urban wilderness dipping to the shoreline.

I just want to feel this for a little while to remember what it is to be human and to be loved before I slink off into my hardened winters where I shall let the ice creep over my heart in my frozen kingdom. I just want to touch you one last time before I lose all of this into an endless night cradling a dead heart. I just want to remember you and your golden skin under my fingers as the last light of the day slips away before I lose my soul to the stars of isolation and longing. I will stand under the cold moon thinking of you, not so very far away from me, and understand that tomorrow I will wake up alone with this space in me never really filling up and never really letting me go.