Futurisms' Myriad Marvels

It’s all light and lightness, cozy in the heavy white of morning dreams. A creaky hand of mine excavates the sheets beside me, traversing the hollow of where bedside companions would be. Colors tumble into shapes behind my stubbornly shut eyelids. Angles and flashes and light and nothing and more, depending on which way I loll and roll about the broken down mattress we’ve shoved in the corner beneath thrift-store curtains and odds-and-ends decorations; amongst a litter of clothes and stacks of un-shelved books. The swirled mass of blankets beside me evidence that she’s been here and their remnant warmth evidence it was recent enough. It’s a good thing she quits the bed well before me in the mornings. If she lingered, I’d never write a thing.

When I convince eye-lashes to part with cheeks, she’s perched at the window sill, like a kid to candy store windows. Our mountain looms somewhere in her gaze and the morning sun can’t bleach her silhouette. She heaves a contented sigh and the blinds shimmer around her. I sleepily push up seated and the corners of her mouth lift and the corners of her eyes pinch pleasantly.

“I think the peak thinks we should dance today. At least once.” She says, gravely. “To something old and something new. But not necessarily in that order.”

“Easy for him to say. Mountains don’t have to finish dissertations.” I reply, gruffly, while tucking a tired pillow behind my head.

I press my eyes closed again, gently, and the swirl of shapes and kaleidoscope patterns washes around me. For the theater of my mind, the random dance of rods and cones before the blood-vessel patterned curtains. She’ll pad across the floor in bare-feet and re-inhabit the mass off blankets and sheets where she nests with me every night when our eyes can’t keep to their reading lines. She’ll run a cold hand across my chest and hook an ankle with mine and nuzzle into the crook of my arm and chest. Her cheekbone will set into the notch of a long-ago-broken collarbone as though God set the cost of this moment before our births; one bitter tumble and 6 high-school weeks in a sling.

“Did you notice?” she whispered into the egg-shell sheets.

“Notice?” with eyes still closed, feeling her breath rise and fall.

“God gave us a new place in the night. We’ve been the victim of angelic relocation. I can’t believe you slept through a miracle, young man.” She yawned,” While you were staring at me, I bet you didn’t notice the drywall is now exposed beams and white-washed cedar walls.”

She poked me in the ribs.

“You’ll find that Gabriel rolled up his sleeves and built our deck in the night, with his own golden sweat and honey blood. Patio furniture, delivered by cherubic messengers, carved from heavenly Galilean corral, light and sturdy, bears our morning meal. Jesus himself strolled through the home, performing inverse-fig-tree miracles on every pot and planter. We live in a sea of white and green. Michael’s sword cauterized a white-sand beach just steps from our front door. The basket is already packed with brie and strawberries and crusty, rustic bread.”

“I’d settle for coffee,” I teased.

“Let’s not pretend I’m the weird one, yeah?”

“Coffee, three pages and lunch and a swim. Then we’ll dance. Does the peak have a playlist in mind?”

“Let’s start with Marvin.”

“…and end with Justin?”

“and we’ll improvise in between.”

In our still-damp t-shirts and swim-clothes, we swayed and smiled and laughed as the afternoon sky darkened with the mountain’s bass-beat of thunder. It would be a week before we saw another soul. A month before either of us laughed at anyone else’s jokes.