In Between the Moon and You
It’s the Counting Crows lyrics. Or maybe it’s not. It’s your old band shirt. Or maybe it’s not. It’s your smell. Or your eyebrow twitch when you ponder. Or your the way your left tricep sort of spasms before it flexes and defines itself from the rest of your arm when you move just so. Or your…
Oh, hell. Who gives a shit what it is. It’s all of it. It’s none of it.
Important thing is that it’s all gotten my mind spinning. And those goddamn lyrics…
We made out under the tree yesterday. Like teenagers who don’t give a shit who is there. You read to me and I watched your lips form words until I couldn’t stand it. Anna Begins started swimming through my head and your lips. It was like there was nothing else for me to do. As soon as my mind moved on to Round Here, I was gone.
You always made fun of my love for Counting Crows. Sure, they can be mainstream and whatever else you say. But I don’t care. The singer gives himself to every word and it’s poetry. Every time.
I hum the part where Maria takes her clothes off. And my lips were on yours. You didn’t even see it coming, you who were halfway through a line from an old forgotten poem that no one but you has read in a thousand years. I was all over you and you kept reading the words, even though the book had fallen from your hands. You knew them all already…
You were pinned between the tree and my chest. I sat on your lap and kissed you like the world was gone tomorrow. And who knows. It could be. I read about a goddamn suicide bomb going off halfway across the world and maybe that’s us tomorrow. Or the day after. It’s all so fucking short and meaningless unless we give it meaning, this tiny, imperfect life of ours.
I want to give it meaning. I want to be someone’s meaning. And right then, that meant my tongue inside your mouth and your lips between my teeth. Gentle but with urgency. Soft but with insatiable drive. That’s me. I pretend to be happy but I’ll never be. There’s always more.
I had my legs wrapped around your lower back and I didn’t know whether a skirt was a good or a bad thing to be wearing right then. I could tell that what I was doing to you was not too much. I could tell you wanted more. All I wanted to do was give you everything. What could stop me? Not a bomb. Not a war. Nothing.
“She said she’s close to understanding Jesus,” the lyrics go on in my mind, a mile a minute and also with the slow careful drift of lazy clouds. Of molasses that slides, wet, hungry, over lips just as hungry. Goddamn, even my metaphors turned pornographic as I moved on your lap, never having enough of you touching my chest, kissing my mouth, my neck.
So that happened yesterday. And there has been no single moment since that hasn’t been filled with constant replaying of each second there under the sturdy oak.
I’ve thought of it, of you, of your chest on mine, of your hands in my hair, of your strong back in my hands, of your smell and taste, of your soft breaths-turned-moans as I took you as mine. Of the clothes that lay between us, the thin layers that clung to the wet parts of me, the growing parts of you. I knew we couldn’t take things further there. But oh how I wanted to.
Who knows when I will see you again? Who knows how long we’ll be able to wait that time or the next before I am on you again, before my hunger is partially quenched, before we decide we don’t care who is watching. After all, it is a time of war. People are dying. It seems insulting not to take every moment for our own.
And that is why now, in the infinite mindscape of my own bed, here, under these covers, I think of exactly what I wanted to do yesterday and what I will most certainly do to you the next time we meet. When I shall leave you empty, dazed, sweating. When we’ll use the unknown time we have on this earth to lick each other’s wounds and kiss each other’s soft spots. To taste every part. To wonder if there is more out there to be had…
