They had hoped to find the equilibrium between white hot and frigid, silent and noisy, clasped and turned away.
They knew how to live in yesterday, and they knew tomorrow. It was navigating today that left them unbalanced, teetering on the brink of something unusually steep and dark.
They backed away from the edge and from each other. Some days, it’s simply easier to admit defeat.
It always took her bruises days to surface, sometimes so long that she thought she’d imagined the sore places under her fingers. They arose like leaves emerging from a river, blurry around the edges, dark at the centers. A new one arrived on her forearm four days after she’d last seen him, and she touched it with her tongue, tasting the unexpected salt of desire.
He worried, each time, about the curvature of the spine. He explained how one wrong move could unite flexion and disaster. Contraction could become more than a way to bring words closer together.
He hobbled the situation with all that caring. She watched him retreat, back bent by the weight of the worry.
This was, at it turned out, ordinary time. She had forgotten that children get taller with the weeks, nights end at dawn, and fireworks explode in the air, not in her hands.
For a moment, she thought she’d gone soft, that she’d lost the edge by which she knew herself.
“Did I hear you correctly?” she asked, and it turned out she did not.
She never let on what she thought for that split second, never told him how she really thought he felt.
The helicopters passed over so often, their sound transformed to a cat’s purr, the hum of a dryer. The people curled up in their homes, rocked to submission by the noise outside.
At a party, she huddled in a corner, trying to explain to a new friend what this all meant. The friend shrugged, then walked away to refill his glass. Next to her, a window rattled, though the wind was perfectly calm. She tried to lock eyes with anyone else in the room, but all gazes remained unfocused. She never expected it to get this bad this soon.
She didn’t notice the wound when it happened. It was later, when she caught a glimpse in the mirror of blood running down her arm, that she realized what had happened. She looked at it then, closer, at the depth and width of it. It stung then, a deep sting that started at the base of the gash and grew out from there.
The blood stopped soon, and the wound wept clear fluid, no matter how many bandages she applied. It kept on like that until it stopped. It kept on like that until it healed into a scar.
100 Proof 