When the love starts to fall away. |
Allergic Crease It begins with a tickle, on the skin, in the corner of the eye, and you ignore it because you’d rather this kind of flutter than not. It’s a budding chestnut for the biography, and it ripples the blood, threshing like foamy rapids: hysterical spume under the cracking glass. The fingers make contact, and there are a thousand, tiny explosions that never make a sound or move a hair. The breath comes next, with the smooth collision of lips, infusing each other with a flood of divine certainties, not the least of which is the conviction that twin flames do burn together in the cosmos, just as the mystics insisted. It’s the magic of predestination, surely, and common sense gives way to the love delusion as it wrecks all the innocents caught deer-eyed in the path. At first, there is no sleep or food and the body still thrives, feeding only on rhythm and friction, denying human design. Then, there is the need for both in balanced portions, equal servings of vegetables, fruits and meat punctuated with warm, leg-locked catnaps and shared bowls of milk. The changes move on subtly, until one day when the meals are huge and silent, and sleeping is cold and endless, like it was before except now the skin is itching and the eyes have begun to water. It may be a reaction, but to what? You pray it’s not to chocolate (too rash a consequence for even the most vengeful of gods). The bees have kept their distance, put off by an immoderate sweetness that they can do nothing with, and you’ve never been rubbed wrong by the spirit of the flowers in the garden. Still, you numbly latch your reflection and note the allergic crease; a fine line across the bottom of your nose, pale and horizontal, a filament scar that neatly declares an unopened wound. The entanglement has started to sting you, as the dander of a black cat’s back will do to the sensitive eye, and it no longer makes sense to keep pushing at the nose when it is the cat which clearly needs to go: the crease will fade eventually. Once, it was unmixed rapture around the onset of the tickle or the itch, but without warning the senses were corrupted and the love had spread too thin, no longer warming the body, but grating it: a woolen blanket on tender skin. It leaves you with nothing but chocolate, but at least that’s something. |