Act 1.  You and me

Filets of trout perfectly browned in warm butter beside a quartered lemon slice on two Wedgewood plates. A carrot-sculpted rosette.  Two glasses of rosé.  Brown, yellow, blue, orange, red passion. “I’ll have iced tea; she’ll have water.” The server left us alone to hold hands in the flickering light of a candle, the shape of light caressing your face like breezes rustling a redbird’s feathers. 

Act 2.  Her

I just want someone. Why can’t I find someone?  They come in here every week, sit at the same table, hold hands, never see me, see only each other, like I’m a distant noise, a car crash in some other neighborhood, a solar flare whose eruption won’t affect their climate-controlled environment, a damned iceberg calving, dissolving into the sea, disappearing into atoms small enough to be carried on the waves of their love sighs.

Act 3.  Me 

You caulk the seams between my stone edges and your seamlessness. You are chocolate drizzled on my finger to lick. Let my thumb inscribe circles on your palm to plot roads we’ll travel. Let my tongue touch your tongue and speak of time and song.

Act 4.  You 

You help me see light in different colors. The other men I’ve known have been as cataract, their needs obscuring my vision of self. “Come on, babe, just this once, I promise.” “Hey, get me a beer, won’t ya’,” he’d say while scratching his lazy ass.” “Let me tell you what I think.” “That chick friend of yours has a big mouth, always goin’ on about her this or that. I mean, who gives a you know what?!” You listen. You take the words I speak and weave them into garlands. 

Act 5.  Her

Four more hours of this shift. Burning my hands on hot plates, my soul searing in loss.  Then what?  An empty night of Hulu.  Bottles of bud diesel clanking against my teeth, the sound resounding throughout my hollow apartment.  Endless loops of “Beautiful Pain,” Eminen screeching in AK-47 staccatos, “Yesterday was the tornado warning/Today’s like the morning after/Your world is torn in half/. . . It’s like an enormous asthma.”

Those two, sitting at the table, eyes fondling each other, their hands linked like a bridge joining his hemisphere to hers. 

I’m falling, my gravity gone and I’m reeling into ether, nothing tethering me.  Loveless.  I want.  And my want echoes.

– Steve Gerson