I recognize the sound of the ocean. Another pang of reminiscence. Charcoal waves relentlessly clawing at the land. There is not much sand left, all drawn out by the incessant fingers of the tide. An ashen sea stretched out to support a tin sky. You speak of personal events post-end. I forget if I asked for that information or if you just began talking about it. You'd retreated to a spiritual enclave, a place that held onto its greenery as the rest of the world wilted. I start thinking of zen gardens so I assume somewhere in your monologue, you mention buddhism. School, a master who protects, teaches, comforts. Redolent of relationships between an "I" and a "You." Maybe I envy the connection. Maybe being open to care could have kept me in a human skin. I follow. I listen. I try to imagine what compassion must have felt like so soon After, when the wounds still gaped and oozed.


The cave mouth becomes obstructed by the high tide. Do the tides actually continue too? We pick our way, carrying our shoes, through knee-deep brine. The odor tickles my nose. My shins tingle as if they'd been exposed to a particularly acrid downpour. Before the darkness becomes pitch, a light flares. Your face is illuminated by a clumsily-wrapped torch. You move to another sconce and set its stem aflame as well. You are beaming with pride. This is your palace carved into the bluffs. How am I to fit in the role opposite you? I curl into your joy like a parasite, feed off your vitality. You don't seem to mind. You invite me into your embrace. Your body responds to our proximity. A language more corporeal, less alien, a language I can speak without moving my mouth. Words are cold things. I move against you. Here is heat. From out of this frigid world I eagerly bear your fire. Is this care? Is this care? My hands find the heat in you. I want to become such warmth.

I play the heroine in the house. I collect shells and show them to you and try to learn mirth from your expressions. This is a mask I wear upon my face and gestures. A smile, a softening of the eyes, a soft, mild touch to your brow. The ease of it--a second-nature reaction to a given situation--the execution is flawless. So, why should your expression be tinged with melancholy?



You come differently than before, almost reverently. Your body wracks in agonized pleasure. Like the world is imploding onto the moment of your climax. Is it a Tantric thing? I would be jealous--How do you manage such heights? How can even this be in anyway transcendent?--but I'm too busy trying to locate a source. Did I do something to make you come like the end of the world?

You're smiling bleary and blissful and I wonder what you learned at the base of a Lotus statue that stands by the sea with a sage called Zen Xheng. What is this joy? Surely not a jewel found in the sand of my flesh. Say, did you check the oyster, boy? I'm afraid I've run out of pearls, but you've kept so many treasures from the past I wonder how you managed to harbor happiness too. It's a foreign language, the spectrum of emotions that used to play around my brain. It've shed so much skin. Pared down to a lizard brain--I bake my head on sun-tilted stones so the blood bubbles up to that extremity too. That's where I go. What is ME? (Half-infuriated at you for dredging up such questions--I never used to ponder this way, not this me.) The shreds shedded among the yucca plants, impaled on their spires, or this remnant shuffled cityward who stumbled into you? It hardly matters, but you seem everything you once were and I wonder how it all survived unscathed. Did you lose and get it back again, an Easter-egg hunt for your limbs, gathered in a rainbow basket tied with a yellow ribbon, and you jigsaw it all back again. Did you rebuild it all from bits of string and microchips left in the alleyways? Did you hold it all to you, fragile manuscript of Self, chanting like a mantra this is me this is me this is me...?

You smile. Maybe it's the first real smile I've seen in my life, more real than the grin of temporary relief spreading in the wake of an orgasm. Perhaps the smile prepares me for the caress. You reach out and I'm trembling because I know something is coming, something irreversible. It's your hand, dark dark fingers brush my cheek with moisture. Both hands. I see red. You paint me in blood from the palette of your wrists. It runs down from the open wounds into your palms and you paint my neck and my shoulders.

You have spiralled down too, then. The shelter of past identity a fragile membrane against the darkness. Have I sheared the skin by touch or memory? You never breathed the rarified air of absolute desolation, never fisted the damned feather and screamed yourself hoarse. This is your strangled voice. My arms become your masterpiece. Whirlpool contagion. You have tasted how flesh becomes metallic under an aluminum sky. It damaged you.

You massage vermillion into my hair, twist strands of it, braid tress to blood. This won't bind me to you, but I don't think you realize this. All of your gestures are heavy with symbols, and I refuse to read them. I see but stop short at the threshold of comprehension (the darkness comprehendeth it not). I never stood close enough to fall trap-ward. The tiger pit, a gaping maw, you smile and wave at me from the opposite side, beckon me to come across. My eyes not so full of you to not notice the blade-hewn bamboo poles ranged like soldiers below. The only thing I allow to sink in is the water of your life. My skin is a desert; my pores absorb your scarlet rain. She is Earth, He is Sky. Isn't that how it always was? Your sacrifice feeds her. You perish, she goes on and waits for the next you, whether you've the strength to return or no. She has no choice. Neither do you.

They aren't perfect slashes. I imagine you earnestly carving patterns into the flesh of your wrists: a rose twined with barbed wire, or a spider on a morning-dewed web, something pretty in red. But you did it just now, at the moment of coming, while your body writhed in ecstasy. A lidless eyeball. Final touches. I lead your hands over my thighs. I wear a sheer veils of blood.

You have a secret you're dying to tell me but savoring the suspension. It is supposed to surprise me and delight me, that's what your expression says. I know you don't know I haven't kept soft layers that allow for delight. Little-girl Delight in her white lacey frock has fled the golden meadows; in her place crouches Delirium sing-songing in the rainy alleys. It's better this way; it rains almost everyday. You want me to guess what it could be, your hands behind your back, your eyes wide as saucers, each a small plate with a kitten on it. I won't be as rapturous as you need me to be and I'm trying to gauge how much this will hurt you, weighing your need for me to wear a happy mask and my reluctance to put one on.

You fetch up something and press it into my hand. The smile beams more broadly. You are still leaking and I close my lips over the seeping rosary, swallow bead after bead. Something is exchanged, something cold and warm is in my hand now. With your emptied fist, you seize my wrist. You step closer. Your hand/my hand goes to your neck. My stare tangles in yours. I'm not a calm blue being. Our tendrils snarl and twine. You don't even flinch when the exact-o knife bites into the pulse at your throat.

Your gasp becomes a kiss full of gore. The cut has sent blood up your throat. You baptize me in ruddy exhalations. I see the secret etched in the glass of your eyes. We're to go together, you and I, into the scarlet sunset. Finish me sounds a lot like fall with me in a desperate whisper.

So dramatic of you. So much like the performer-you from a previous life. Smile and cry and bleed for public adoration. I'm a poor audience for your finale. I won't play along, won't suspend disbelief. Under your expectant gaze I shake my head slightly, but it's enough. You see and understand. Maybe I've shattered your rapture. You kiss me anyway and I imbibe the last of you.

I wear the last traces of your essence. You are a waxen mannequin crumpled on the sand. I could abandon it. It means nothing. So many corpses walked away from, but this time I can't. It's not really from a sense of responsibility, silly convention, hollow forms as hollow as your bones. There needs to be an end. It's as automatic as burying shit.

I've buried so many things under stones.

It takes well into midnight to gather enough kindling, enough splinters with your reserve of sacred fuel to ignite the heavy wood to burn hot enough to reduce the shell to dust. It's a good thing you ended so close to the moon's full. It burns all night. Fire brought down countless cities. It keeps me warm this far from shelter. I keep a detached vigil, just receiving the image of flame licking at a form. The light of morning replaces the dwindling pyre. I pile stones until the muddy haze of the horizon sucks down the sun again, until the cairn comes up to my knees.

Only after the cairn is complete do I enter the sea. Flakes of blood, rusted earth, lift off my skin. The water swallows your blood. The earth eats your dust. I will never see this spot again. It's suspended in time, another pivot point for then and now. Then-sub-one. Now-sub-two.

You are the sane one, I suppose. You've escaped. When did your tale take this turn--or was this always its trajectory? I don't end with you. The sky still unfolds when the sun goes down. I live alone and I will die alone. The illusion won't hold.

I was nothing. I was darkness, and there was no place from which regret or fear could emerge. It approximates peace. Then, you called me into being. Echoes in the abyss begin to define limits, extents, potentials. How can I sleep, sink down serenely with such noise? I was drowning and resolved to that placid element. Dissolving and becoming liquid and oblivion. Then yanked by your tyrannical fish hook. No! I tried to scream and, Let me go! But that would give myself over to words. It was too soon for that. Now, it's too late for that too. To feel is to know the shape of pain. Sinister light, mocking misery until we gouge out our eyes. I can't close my eyes. They're forced open eyelash by eyelash. Tied and tried and dried to dates, shriveled into seeing. I paint it all a uniform white. Now, there's some red. I never want to know what I'm missing, what's missing of me.

When James died, I stood dry-eyed at his graveside.

There is nothing and everything familiar about the desert I return to. I fall easily into echoes. I eat beetles after breaking open the carapace. I obliterate all traces of my passage. I go into the cities when there is not enough sustenance creeping through the sage bushes. I don't speak. There is no need. My eyes go cavefish-blind. My tongue turns to meat. I scratch in the dust with nail-less fingers. I sleep and dream of running or falling out of trees or nothing.

I will never die. I outlast the tale, all their tales. An impoverished Eternal. A ragged phoenix, barely blazing crawls from the ashes. They perish. They always perish. The heavens may come crashing down but the landscape persists despite the splits and shifts and sundry disasters. I will go back to my hermitage, curl into the solitary spaces like a broken child and let language slip away. Nothing is changed. That I cast a shadow when I walk is an illusion. I am designated witness. When I am blind, I will absorb through my skin. I continue reading beyond the last page.