Skin on Skin
The weather is a willing muse, and the warm drizzle that touched my face on my slow walk home, felt like a treasured hand I'd always known, and always missed, stroking my face, gently, sometimes in little gusts, teasing, yet present.
What is love? Is it the touch of skin on your skin as you close your eyes and sink your being into the scent and salt and hair and texture, or is it what you feel after that hand no longer rests on your face? Does love need another? Do I love you because I miss you?
Or is it [love] a question, and do we delude ourselves imagining it to be an answer...
The rain's been my companion at times like these, on such warm, dark and lovely nights. Ephemeral, yet tactile, fleeting yet committed. If it all ended tonight, I wouldn't mind. I heard the trees rustle, playing with the rain. They breathe, and I did. Long, deep breaths.
Life is about holding your head up high- not to be brave, but to be alive. It is about feeling what you feel. I wondered, with a smile, whether what I missed was what I loved, or whether the act of missing was love?
Looking back, I've never been more present than when I've been absent from myself. Let me rest my face in the cup of your hands, hold it safe, let me lie on you and feel you breathe, and in that tryst, that moment of loss, I am most who I am. I am myself in the touch of another- physical, literal, otherwise...
My heart is full tonight, and I laughed to myself, and I felt like I could cry at the same time. My heart felt so full, like it could burst, and fill the big, open night. I looked up into the rain, visible by the white city lights that it dives past. My story, though short, is rich. My skin, has memory. It remembers tears like it did the rain. It remembers you, and through that, I do too. My thoughts are playing hide and seek with me now... they play at my fingertips, but when I reach out to touch, they are no longer there. Their memory teases me, but I can't see their faces.
You remember the body that lay beside you when it is no longer there. Companions, so powerful in what they mean to you, for what they were to you when you lay beside them. Did they matter, or is it what they mean to you now that does? Both. My skin says that one could not have been without the other. When you lie at night, you are never alone, there are many that lie beside you. In my diary you are who I choose to describe you as- by name, by stories, by how I want to remember you when I need to remember you, but in my being you are what my skin felt when it touched yours. I do not feel alone. I am not alone, because my skin, once touched, never can forget.
This life, in time, will feel through its skin again, and again.... there are billions like me, skin touching skin, remembering, never forgetting, even if we think or try to, or think we aught to try to. I close my eyes. I feel the gentle breeze. I smell the scent of the rain having quenched parched soil, and it brings me back to my childhood. That too is touch. I open my eyes. Life is so very beautiful.
Note: Written after seeing Mine vaganti
