This Moment is Our Universe

I traced the swirls of his hair with my half-open eyes. They were like waves I wanted to be engulfed in. I wished to be swept up in the rhythm of them… washed away into an exquisite oblivion. 

We were cocooned on the bed by an energy field created by the past, kept in there by our desire to remain in the present. We didn't need a future, just for that moment to pause forever. 

The mid-afternoon sun illuminated half his face. I lay in the shadow, observing the dust particles orbit his head. He reflected warmth onto me… into me. My eyes. My nostrils. My throat. My heart. This moment was our universe. 

The ugliness of sorrow dissolved in his company. Melancholia became a faded photograph buried in a box. His electric stare set the box alight and I watched the ashes float, defeated. Destroy them, I whispered in my mind. 

I am in love with you, I wanted to say. I wanted to capture the universe we lay in, absorb it and be absorbed by it. I wanted him to absorb every part of me. Every cell. Seal the exit, lock us into this euphoria.

I am in love with you. The words swirled gently in my mind. My mouth remained still; guarded. 

He sat up, naked and bright. Hair shaggy from my angle, now squiggly-shaped. He walked to the kitchen of the hotel apartment which was shiny and untouched. He poured a cup of tea and said “I’m going home next week.” 

Gravity reappeared in a nanosecond. We began falling at the speed of light. 

“Come with me.” 

My body, static. 

He controlled the light of the room with his mouth. The darkness plunged me back into full color. 

His home was across the ocean, far from the light of our moment. My home was somewhere away from where we were; nameless. My home was the air I breathed in that room. 

I turned to face the window. I closed my eyes and swam in the orange glow, diving deeper in my elated silence. My growing responsibilities of the outside world shriveled into a mere blip. My anxiety, comatose. Fear, crippled by the brightness. 

“Come with me” played on loop like a wind-up toy doing backflips. And when it stopped, I turned the little plastic knob again and again, until eventually I would become the toy. I wanted to become a plastic version of myself. 

I wanted to be someone else. 

I lay on my back and opened my eyes to the sterile white ceiling. I scanned it for any sign of stain, crack,  blemish. Nothing. Sterile. I needed for there to be something wrong with it. Something to make me feel I belonged, as I now felt an overwhelming sense of intrusion. 

The distance between the bed and the kitchen became vast. We fucked on this bed just before and our worlds fused, but now they were travelling in opposite directions. I didn't know why. 

My silence became a drumbeat. 

“Do you want to come with me?” 

“I don't know” escaped my mouth. I didn’t even think, but when my brain caught up, it screamed. I silenced it. Something had shifted my feelings in this place, and I loathed it for intruding. But I didn't push it away.

“It’s okay if you don't want to come.” 

Don't say that. My body curled up. Don't be reasonable like that. Make me feel like I’d be stupid for not going with you. Tell me I’m a fucking idiot. 

I’m in love with y… no. Something didn’t feel right. Who is thinking this? 

I stared at him, drinking his tea calmly as the cocoon shattered, cold air sweeping in. The light couldn't warm me now. I was frozen. I was a cube inside a glass of reality. I didn't want to face it but it was facing me. It was swallowing me whole. 

The outside world was waiting for me and I needed to return to it. I desperately wanted to stay in this room, but the memories of everything I had been hiding from were pulling me back into the shadows. Away from the sunshine: the heat of his skin, the turquoise of his eyes, the waves in his hair. 

In a few minutes this universe exploded… detonated by the realization I couldn't love someone I didn't know. I could love the idea of him. The prospect of laughing and smiling and holding hands and fucking and cuddling and waking up together. But those things were just ideas. Fantasies. Meteoroids wandering around a universe larger than ours. My universe. My own ugly, cold, scared world. 

My eyes opened to see the full illumination of the fantasy I had created. It no longer bathed in the light, but was exposed by it. And in this new light, I understood that the man standing before me, whose sweat had dried on my skin and altered my scent, was possibly… probably, equally as naïve as me. In thinking we had the power to create a new universe. 

He noticed the defeat in my posture as I stared into the grain of the hard wooden floor, feeling the weight of my childishness. Defrosting from hypnosis. Sobering from the seduction. 

I raised my head. I stood. I walked. I wanted to kiss him. Hold him. Be held and consumed by him. Forget about this ice storm that had ambushed my mind. But my trajectory was involuntary, and I found myself in the bathroom, facing in the spotless mirror a man who felt like a boy. A man with strong shoulders. A man who, on the outside, never needed to be rescued from the world he was born into. I looked into his eyes, and I saw green planets spinning infinitely. And the sparkle of something that just would not die. It simply refused. 

I walked back to him, re-entering his stratosphere. His position remained, tea in hand, face unchanged. The clock hands reached 3pm and I stood mere inches from his face, cold. Awake. He put his tea down on the bench. We held each other, so far away, but close enough. I took a deep breath in. “Tell me more about where you live,” I whispered.