Tag: pacific nw

I miss waking up back in the Pacific NW, where each morning I could stroke the soft gold of his hair. His deep, untroubled sleep was brilliant; an alien entity to me. How can he slip back into the comfort of that soft release—pulling me, fidgeting and anxious, back into his arms without ever truly stirring? My main gripe, I suppose, is my incapacity to register wonder in this world, what Nathan called my chronic weariness…But the word “wonder” is no hyperbole for the borrowed realization I found in his arms—that there are bodies in this world so innocent, so undamaged, that they are not yet startled by contact, by affection. There are bodies that still believe that they belong entirely to themselves. I think that’s why I liked walking with him, through the woods and the plains, better than anything. Each step he took was decisive, unburdened, as though he had never doubted the contract between himself and the world. All this to say that I miss him and the dog and the joy he took in simply being, though I railed against him at times, accused him of dwelling in fantasy, of indulging in the luxury of withdrawing from the oppression and pain that others had no choice but to acknowledge. Perhaps some of that sentiment came from a place of actualized politics, but most of it was born of envy and of the fear that accompanies my sense of exile from the bright world he inhabits still. I miss him. I want him to breathe his settled manner back into my mouth.