Going out alone was a bad idea.
After contemplating life for a few minutes on a rooftop terrace I ended up at the last place we’d been drunk together. I made myself down a few drinks in rapid succession and tried not to remember how she’d helped finagle my way in past the discerning security with their ID scanners. When my belly was up to the bar I tried not to remember how she’d challenged one of the bartenders to ‘take a shot’ of whipped cream. While I was dancing, evading guys who wanted to put their sweaty paws on me, I tried not to remember the heat we had so easily kindled, in part due to hiding in plain sight from everyone who’d accompanied us. I tried not to let my eyes stray to the exact locations, seemingly spotlighted by the laser show, where we’d been unable to resist each other and stole deep kisses that made me long to drag her into the nearest bathroom stall.
As I sit up in my bed, the ceiling fan giving a slight breeze that stirs the cover of the book next to me, I try not to remember…as I glance at the other side that’s graced with objects instead of her…I try not to remember. Her scent. The feel of her. The way her cries for release took the form of my name and weaved cozy knots around us…knots that I hoped with all my heart wouldn’t be undone.
—
I had quite deliberately, earlier in the evening, done a retracing of paths we’d once taken. The Capitol seemed to eerily loom over me every time I passed it, daring me to commit this deed. And so I did.
This is where I had captured a halo around her hair. Twilight was approaching and we were in that golden hour. I played the images back on my camera display and I fell in love all over again with her casually blinding smile that made the dwindling sunlight tucking itself around her seem as nothing.
This is where a group of us had gathered at one point for my fall shoot for Secondhand Honeymoon. There’s a particular spot in this picture where I had adjusted her bow tie. We were both smiling; there was easy amusement in the air, but all I could think of was how I wanted to take her hand in mine and, with that, say I was hers.
This is where we’d sat down together while the sun gradually sank lower into the sky, and we failed to keep our hands and mouths entirely to ourselves. In between increasingly daring paths our fingers had traced, and lingering looks that signaled fires merely banked, not extinguished; we wondered out loud about the culture of our mutual workplace, where it had all started with an accidental meeting of the eyes and a hello escaping from her first.
We had walked across this landing at the top of the steps; we had faced this direction, seen these same trees. The sky was less vivid then. It wasn’t as sweet.
But she was next to me. The sky needn’t do anything then.
Sept Jours 