submarine dreams

On this night, my wife and I waged war on full stops. And it was kind of romantic.

Written with my Tumblr wife Amy

North Atlantic waves stretched out under overcast skies grey with the walls of empty rooms before light brings color to them, ghosts cold in the corners but somehow welcoming, somehow remembering the pull of the ocean on swollen knees—dreams draped across the swells.

We were argonauts turned marauders by the night, the moon kissing our eyelids and dreaming of crimson tides to carry us closer to home because all we had ever wanted was to be understood, anchored to stay afloat but by morning we had disappeared into a reality that was not our own, stolen and still we slept alone with only letters on screens to crawl up into for warmth.

And we found the words under sheets slung across furniture with broken legs in the captain’s quarters of a ship, long since swallowed by the sea as we had tried to be, but we found ourselves always buoyant, adrift with our eyes to the abyss because that was the darkness that wrapped itself around our minds at night, pressed against windows under rooftops lit only by the Milky Way as it shone above the open ocean.

The tips of our fingers wrinkled from spending too much time in salt water tracks trying to find one another’s eyes, hand outstretched so that you can put yours into mine placing your sadness in my palms so that we would find our way together, thousands of miles and still we were never alone, you with me in whispers around our ears in background noises that carry our affections in poorly contructed paragraphs that defy everything we had been taught as we made our own truth, broken rules like broken bones tied together with string and packaged for understanding eyes, yours and mine.

Because you were mirrored in my irises, dilated to accept the faint light from a telescope eyepiece as I tried to see you, always defeated by the curve of the Earth, and we owed our connection to miles of glass fibers drawn across the grey plains calmed by the weight of water, dark and empty but even in the dark there was life and even in our broken minds we had room for each other and so we talked about sailing and seaweed and tides and sea-girls because I saw you in the sea every time I stood with toes against cold surf and watched lighthouses on the horizon.

Words were all we had, an exchange of ideals for our return to land, of farmhouses and the quiet life where the outside could no longer cruelly penetrate our thoughts in a garden of bones, beautiful and cultivated shapes of our own while we rewrote our forevers in languages they couldn’t understand because we had made it this far while others would have perished in our shoes, walking down long roads and finding nothing but dead ends so we settled in the cul-de-sac of our disorder to call it home, a place for us to belong.

21 February 2012 ·