Electricty conductive body paint.
Falling from the bus, pushed to my knees by a wave of car sick nausea, falling down to find him waiting, two roses in hand, one scarlet, one jade, waiting and in love, curiosity transformed over half a decade into smitten into smote, a slow walk, arms linked, step in step, finally a pair five years later than when we met, when I had taken him home.
We had been dancing at the same place, a night club gone goth for a friend’s industrial night, everyone in black, fishnets, and spikes. Somehow I convinced him to come with me for tea, (yes, actual non-euphimistic tea), curled on my couch, my cripple’s cane leaning against my leg, his sardonic conversation leaning against my heart, as pleasantly dark as his pleated kilt and kinky, curly hair. In the morning, he had gone home, leaving behind only his name, an assemblage memory of a warm, witty smile and an e-mail address to which he only barely replied. After awhile of silence, I chalked it up to one of life’s silly things, counting myself lucky having a hot boy over for tea, and that was that.
Until it wasn’t.
We found each other again through Eliza, her paintings up at Anachrotechnofetishism luring him out and into my orbit again. Soon he was visiting, tangling back into my life, staying on my couch as we went to arts festivals, as I would stay on his on my way through Seattle, the both of us blazing. Eventually, more recently, it was silently decided we would try again where we left off, an arbitrary agreement with no forethought and no warning that coalesced out of air, a relationship wrought without words, twisted together from a few meaningful glances and a deep understanding of what needed to happen next.
“You know I dreamed about you.”
Fast forward, I am pulled from a bus by the fury of my sickness, out and down, and out, having been on a bus for three hours, reading, waiting, wishing I could sleep, the sky on fire with yet another one of those perfect west coast afternoons, beautiful, boring, cliche as a painting, traveling unknown toward a moment for five years, feeling conscripted to the inevitable, as if slotting back into a path I never should have left, the parsed coastal combination of manipulated reasons I can lay out like cards. Curled around my belly, I am struck dumb on the sidewalk, a crumpled ball, but then I look up to see him, poised in sudden terror that I didn’t get off the bus at all, and suddenly everything is okay.
“Tony,” I wave, and he turns, and his face is all I need to know.
