Here you are, frozen in space. Timeless sparkle mystery. Like a modern day Hepburn, such poetic grace. A half-smile, distant gaze, off in your dreamy world where you so often dwell. Always austere, sunglasses half raised, as the wind and sand whip past your face. What were you remembering? The lotion I just applied still only half dried on your back, a shoddy job we did, leaving us both blotchy painful for days.
You had just told me about your fetish for slips with combat boots, and in a minute you will reach for a cigarette. The police had not yet come to take our beer away. And just before this moment, we had talked of everything: art school and law, writing and crafts, eugenics and boyfriends, war and love, capital punishment and drugs. And just after this, we will smoke and drink and read. You will not swim. In a few hours, we will get tired of fighting the sandstorm, will smell our skin start to burn. I will take you into town, you haven't been there before, and we will have to change in the car. We'll wander down to the riverside and splurge on calamari and good wine, taking photos of the river and the shadows on the tables and laugh at our waiter. You will tell me about your family and I'll tell you about mine as if comparing war wounds, toasting with pinot grigio instead of tears. Our combined bios would make memoir of the year, we'll laugh. We'll exhaust ourselves and watch the sun sliding downward, tinting the river a pinkish red, not wanting to leave just yet. And a small silence will envelop us and we'll stare at the longer shadows and we'll both be off in that dreamland until the wind shifts and we will come back to ourselves and seek out coffee and other adventures still left to name.
But here, in this moment, that has not yet come to pass. Here you are still
sitting, sitting in the sand with your half-smile, distant and relaxed, and we've only just gotten here and the sun is still so bright and the day is so young
And here hospital beds don't exist and here you are so real and vibrant and so happily you. And here your dreaming is only for a moment, not for several days. And here you are not in pain. And here you are not broken. And here you are within reach. And here...

(i miss you, girl. wake up.)

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