Member-only story
Touching Skin
Grieving through love and loving through grief
I hold my book over my head and read poetry to the ceiling fan. The sun is positioned between the elbows of two lovers, her toffee legs are bent, forming
twin dunes. Half of her is a painting of a lazy girl on a sofa with slender fingers and hips like novels. The other half is a portmanteau for me to handle. She holds
a magazine, but reads my fingers tapping her ankle, then sliding, chess-like, across her board. My fingers perform a ritual lightness. Her knee is a meridian. Clouds have gathered to offer rain.
We age at the edges, like a stone. When the storm has blown over, we’ll be a lasting memory of open space, and I’ll have dissipated. My fingerprints will have stayed
inked on her skin, but my grief will have gone with me knowing adventure is a different grief. It makes me sad to think I feel this different, in my same body, like a window
from the Whitney Museum into my old self. The world felt new and big and grand. Now I feel old and tired and worn. New York City has slipped and fallen. My old self is stuck
there. In Nat Sherman and the Met and every bookstore on the lower east side. My hand squeezes her knee. I plant intention and match her eyes to make
