It was the last day before I moved out of my apartment. The apartment that I had shared with my wife for 30 years. She passed away, or literally melted away from me, due to cancer.
The last item I packed away was a chair. Wood covered with black velour and a cloth that resembled the patches of leaves on a windy autumn afternoon. A chair that housed many memories. I had proposed to her when she sat on that chair. She had mumbled yes, as if surprised that I would ask her to marry. We had made love numerous occasions on that chair. It was her favorite chair in which to sit by the window and read.
Our apartment faced Central Park and she loved watching people enter and leave the park, everyday things occurring in the textured landscape of New York City. I would glide toward her and stroke her soft hair, have my hands contemplate on her shoulders. She would stare at the green in the park. I would see blue as I kissed her neck. Unbutton her blouse and gently uncup her breasts from the white moonlight of her undergarments. Her breasts were soft doves, marshmallows, too silken to handle roughly. If I was too harsh, the doves would die… I would place my cheek close as if to warm them….my nose a piercing light searching on her flowers.
The taste of her skin changed, depending on the time of day or night. What was consistent was her body, and how I could mold it with my caresses. A piece of dark forever became an art, after my kisses sculpted the masterpiece. I had to kiss a different area of skin each day, and it was like discovering a landscape to which I had never ventured before. I became an explorer of her body. I felt that if I became a lover, I would have reached the end of the journey. I never wanted the journey to end.
I wanted to become the painter and she would help me with the colors and we would create the painting. Between her thighs we weaved many rainbows of scattered, vibrant, multihued flesh. Her smiles and sighs were telegraphs from distant places that wrestled with our moments. Every movement was dependant on breath, and touch, and the accompanying sound. Every whisper or soft sigh required an answer.
The chair became a car, my head the steering wheel. She continuously readjusted my head, giggling, as she gazed out over the park.
And I became a large aquatic fish, weaving in and out of the currents, in her locked thighs. My lips slurping water and oxygen from the dark depths of the ocean of flesh. I would surface up to see colors from surrounding objects, and sounds of her muffled moans. I would then go back to the ocean, a sea of eternity, with hidden caverns that would peek shadows of sunlight. And I would swim, like a child swimming for his first time in the bathtub. Shrieks of joy, splashes, and cries of laughter and surprise… water overflowing from the center.
Then our roles would change. I would become a tree…for her to climb on…she would drape herself over me as if she were the snow on the branches of winter. I would shake and thrust tornado like movements to wiggle free, but she never released me. She stayed on and on, forever. Apple, ash, birch, breadfruit, cedar, stiffness….branches erect and then branches bending from the wind…readjusting and then propped up from the winds of Eros, I measured my breaths to meld with hers.
And every day was a journey, a journey toward her heart, which every day enriched my soul. When she died, everything turned Dark. It was the darkest night for several weeks, until today, looking at the chair, I remembered what it was to love, and be loved. And how love can transform the simplest things in our life, so that we may become giants in our own…
Originally published April 2009