Variation On A Theme
Jan. 21st, 2006 02:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormI woke up next to him. His skin is intensely soft, slightly furry, with the copper of freckles I'm always reminded of peaches. The bed was warm. There was sunlight outside, and the air in the room was almost crispy-cool.
It was spring. I got up, he was still sleeping, and tried not to creak the cumputer chair loudly as I settled in. I dipped into the internet for an hour, two, and all the while I could turn around and watch him sleeping, if I wanted, at one point snoring slightly and covered in blankets with just one hand sticking out in a graceful arabesque dangling off the mattress. Sometimes I could see his face.
After about two hours I climbed back into bed, the outside of my skin cold from the morning rubbing up against it. He was warm, and it wasn't long before he was awake. That's what I wait for, every morning: I wait for someone to join me. There was conversation and snuggling for awhile, and since we're both sniffly I pulled us up into the shower in the hopes that steam would cute all. I washed him, he washed me, and we shared his towel to dry.
Then it was back to bed. These things start slowly, slightly awkward, because we haven't really known each other that long; the intense familiarity that comes with practice hasn't set in, and we learn about each other each time. There was cuddling, and touching, and biting, and squirming, and really nothing that couldn't strictly fall under those headings-- it's all ways of touching, I suppose. It's my own uncertainty that breaks my heart. I trust him not to follow the social supposed-tos of sex, and so there's nothing as simple here as hitting the right notes. It's all a learning, action and feedback, and all the while the sun was shining outside the window.
That was some more hours, and then another quick shower, and we were out in it. We were out in spring, characterised by light through the air like sun through the water in an aquarium, cool on the skin and yellow-green and alive with promise, alive with conception rather than the pregnancy of full spring yet. Still, spring. Still. And in the springtime we sat and ate sushi at a plastic table looking out at light-splashed concrete (light that was green and yellow with spring like water in an aquarium, alive with promise) and then we went back out into it like it wasn't water, we breathed it and it was there on our skin, and we went hand-in-hand up the road.
These streets we walked, these were streets where we used to live. This is the neighborhood Kynnin and I shared, and this spring sets off memories of so many other springs. Do you know there was a spring where I sat out on the south-facing deck with the faint stain of heat through the pale light in Abbotsford and waited for Jan to come? I vibrated with expectation, that spring. Do you know there were springs upon springs in Mission, and do you know that when I lived on the boat the spring came through the concrete of downtown Vancouver in a sweep of near-imperceptable expectancy even though there was no soft ground to lift the green into it? Do you know I had spent spring in that very neighborhood before, sitting at Fujiya in the morning?
Now it's a different we, and the same neighborhood, and we walked up the street and bought ice cream (gelatto, sorbetto, these are names for the thing that I mean). We bought ice cream, two scoops each, in little bright bowls with tiny plastic shovels, and we each bought a sweet/creamy and a citrus of different types. We sat there then, in the sunlight that was the pale yellow-green of water through a freshwater aquarium, and the flavour of spring came in through the sliding door to our table and warned of the way the forest would smell, if I were there, if I were in the middle of deep rotting leaved and bare-branched trees dripping with moss. That would smell like early spring, but in an ice cream parlour on commercial drive the air merely hinted.
We alternated tastes of ice cream communally and talked. A little of this, a little of that, such a difference in flavours it was that we inflicted that my brain gave out and all the flavours were just static, sensory overload, this and then that, lemon and then matcha, and both the ice cream and the air were cold but I, for once, wasn't. After this, another hour of ice cream after an hour of eating sushi, he walked me to my bus and I went to work.
I've been here before, in the late winter, in the spring. I've been here before, going up the hill with Kynnin in the morning to school through air this colour, lazing together until we were late. I've been here before, waiting for Jan and wandering down the hill to the cafe with him in air that snapped like this, air that felt like cool water on my skin. I've been here before, but of course, these steps don't, quite, feel the same. I feel the same. Spring feels the same. This time I know that I do not know what the future will hold, where always before I was certain I could anticipate it. This time I am older, more scarred, a little rougher, hopefully a little more generous and a little less nearsighted. This time I know what life is without him.
My happy posts are always the same, and I am almost always happy lately. This post is the same. But, the days are different, not different as in beads on a string but different as in seperate twists on a rope that, when you look around and around the rope, you discover are all one thing flowing one into the other but distinct from any given vantage.
Today was a spring day that I spent with Graham, and I want to remember it.
It was spring. I got up, he was still sleeping, and tried not to creak the cumputer chair loudly as I settled in. I dipped into the internet for an hour, two, and all the while I could turn around and watch him sleeping, if I wanted, at one point snoring slightly and covered in blankets with just one hand sticking out in a graceful arabesque dangling off the mattress. Sometimes I could see his face.
After about two hours I climbed back into bed, the outside of my skin cold from the morning rubbing up against it. He was warm, and it wasn't long before he was awake. That's what I wait for, every morning: I wait for someone to join me. There was conversation and snuggling for awhile, and since we're both sniffly I pulled us up into the shower in the hopes that steam would cute all. I washed him, he washed me, and we shared his towel to dry.
Then it was back to bed. These things start slowly, slightly awkward, because we haven't really known each other that long; the intense familiarity that comes with practice hasn't set in, and we learn about each other each time. There was cuddling, and touching, and biting, and squirming, and really nothing that couldn't strictly fall under those headings-- it's all ways of touching, I suppose. It's my own uncertainty that breaks my heart. I trust him not to follow the social supposed-tos of sex, and so there's nothing as simple here as hitting the right notes. It's all a learning, action and feedback, and all the while the sun was shining outside the window.
That was some more hours, and then another quick shower, and we were out in it. We were out in spring, characterised by light through the air like sun through the water in an aquarium, cool on the skin and yellow-green and alive with promise, alive with conception rather than the pregnancy of full spring yet. Still, spring. Still. And in the springtime we sat and ate sushi at a plastic table looking out at light-splashed concrete (light that was green and yellow with spring like water in an aquarium, alive with promise) and then we went back out into it like it wasn't water, we breathed it and it was there on our skin, and we went hand-in-hand up the road.
These streets we walked, these were streets where we used to live. This is the neighborhood Kynnin and I shared, and this spring sets off memories of so many other springs. Do you know there was a spring where I sat out on the south-facing deck with the faint stain of heat through the pale light in Abbotsford and waited for Jan to come? I vibrated with expectation, that spring. Do you know there were springs upon springs in Mission, and do you know that when I lived on the boat the spring came through the concrete of downtown Vancouver in a sweep of near-imperceptable expectancy even though there was no soft ground to lift the green into it? Do you know I had spent spring in that very neighborhood before, sitting at Fujiya in the morning?
Now it's a different we, and the same neighborhood, and we walked up the street and bought ice cream (gelatto, sorbetto, these are names for the thing that I mean). We bought ice cream, two scoops each, in little bright bowls with tiny plastic shovels, and we each bought a sweet/creamy and a citrus of different types. We sat there then, in the sunlight that was the pale yellow-green of water through a freshwater aquarium, and the flavour of spring came in through the sliding door to our table and warned of the way the forest would smell, if I were there, if I were in the middle of deep rotting leaved and bare-branched trees dripping with moss. That would smell like early spring, but in an ice cream parlour on commercial drive the air merely hinted.
We alternated tastes of ice cream communally and talked. A little of this, a little of that, such a difference in flavours it was that we inflicted that my brain gave out and all the flavours were just static, sensory overload, this and then that, lemon and then matcha, and both the ice cream and the air were cold but I, for once, wasn't. After this, another hour of ice cream after an hour of eating sushi, he walked me to my bus and I went to work.
I've been here before, in the late winter, in the spring. I've been here before, going up the hill with Kynnin in the morning to school through air this colour, lazing together until we were late. I've been here before, waiting for Jan and wandering down the hill to the cafe with him in air that snapped like this, air that felt like cool water on my skin. I've been here before, but of course, these steps don't, quite, feel the same. I feel the same. Spring feels the same. This time I know that I do not know what the future will hold, where always before I was certain I could anticipate it. This time I am older, more scarred, a little rougher, hopefully a little more generous and a little less nearsighted. This time I know what life is without him.
My happy posts are always the same, and I am almost always happy lately. This post is the same. But, the days are different, not different as in beads on a string but different as in seperate twists on a rope that, when you look around and around the rope, you discover are all one thing flowing one into the other but distinct from any given vantage.
Today was a spring day that I spent with Graham, and I want to remember it.
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no subject
Date: 2006-01-21 10:43 am (UTC)Remember when times were simple, and ice cream was just ice cream. There was no guilt, just the sound of the ice cream truck. Ding a ding. Matcha ice cream is a favorite - try the jasmin too. I like the Chai, but only because it doesn`t taste like chai. Rice is good, actually. Do you know, I would try dorien if they had it.
z.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-21 10:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-21 12:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-21 09:27 pm (UTC)