We slept side by side and woke up in a heart shape. My spine curved to accommodate the emptiness you could fill and your forehead arched to reach mine. With our knees touching and our chests sighing, someone watched over us and laughed inwardly. There was a whisper in my ear and I mistook it for an unconditional understanding of where I would always be. If it wasn't a definition left to the dreams that happen in the satellite hour of consciousness, I might not have to look upon that moment with such delicate longing. There was no backward or forward in time---only the complete conglomerate of some essence of one magic fitting perfectly into another, no desperation or wild rallying; just soft, light, content. The happiness of half open eyelids in an unbelievable, unremarkable miracle.

I used to struggle to tell dreams. The struggle to explain with painstakingly accurate detail the occurrences from another realm used to take me all day. with time, I have learned that my dreams were more fascinating to me as I saw them than to anyone trying to paint their own picture with my words. I slowly learned that the message to be found was not within the placement of the walls but the broadness of your shoulders. No, wait, that's not right, it can't be. I learned how to keep dream and sleep separate---where were we? Ah yes, my chronic obsession with talking about my intimate adventures of feathery dreams. So I rode a roller coaster right off the tracks and into the sunset where I found the dragons living in the glory of the blazing sun. (Your breath became the fire in my gut and the sleeplessness in my lungs.)

I was traveling over the snow and ice, over the highway separating us from realities and time. It wasn't a spark that came from your hand as it grazed my cheek but a fresh tenderness. I felt a renewed wordless something and it spread from your fingertips to my depths. There was an unimaginably large grin on our faces that started in my eyes and spread to your feet. (Or was it the other way around?) My eyelids wrenched my sight back to the road and then suddenly I was awake. I heard a far away, familiar voice scolding you and I wiggled my toes remembering the sensation of your touch without any contact.

Laying in bed and continually recalling the memory you traced into my skin will not bring me closer to any conclusion. I've grown older in such a small amount of time, all I have to do is close my eyes and I could be back there, wherever that may be this time. Now the problem is not that I am scared of tomorrow, but that yesterday and the fantasies beyond dance out of reach and it seems less pertinent to mutter any yearning for them to return. It was never about how far I could go but how long I could keep it.


Originally performed for slam competition 2/10/11
Originally written on 4/2/08