This is what we all shared

It was the summer when everyone fell in for causes. Everyone had something that they were fighting for. It was sweltering that summer. Our skin would stick to the leather in your car while we drove around town looking for something to care about. The truth of the matter is that we cared about everything. We wanted to be at every protest, holding up signs telling people to stop doing things. We wanted to be on both sides of the aisle, waving signs at ourselves and chanting pithy slogans. We wanted to a part of something larger. We wanted to shed our skin like snakes and slip into something new.

You wound up devoting yourself to poetry, and I decided to devote myself to you. You'd stay awake reading Lorca, crying at certain phrases your night gown half open, collarbone exposed. I'd run my fingers through your hair as if it were silk, as if it were rain, as it were a loom and my hands were thread, as if any moment the last bit might fall to the ground, as if we would one day be older, remembering this day, fondly, as if we would one day be dead, as if we would not exist forever but only inside this eternal moment.

We made narratives by looking up at the stars.  You would point out certain symmetries of night skies and the death of famous men while I listened in the cold, damp, evening. You would tell me that both Napoleon and Caesar died under a full moon. And I would lie awake at night, watching your ribs rise and fall in sleep, such a beautiful liar.

On the way home, the moon lay like an oil slick across the water. I asked you why all of our conversations were about people who were already dead. You told me that you felt you had more in common with them than the living, that they understood you that you were  a kind of labyrinth that needed searching to be found. I kissed you on the lips, hard. I told you that I'd been searching for you all summer, through cups of coffee, trails of cigarette smoke, bits of glass upon the shore, broken fingernails and fingertips, the slight grazing of knees beneath the table. And you turned from me and said, "And yet you are still so far away." I drove away into the evening without ever thinking of you again, until tonight, when a bit of moonlight caught the water in the hotel pool in just such a way that I couldn't help but remember the purple chipped toe nail polish, the scraps of certain evenings rose up, a picture of a past self as seen through fractured glass, and I realized that I'd been missing you without ever knowing it. I walked out onto the balcony, stood and watched the morning come.