Float With Me

When she came to New York she was a woman. A woman I got to share a bed with.

It’s a religious experience, sleeping with her. She slept on the side of the bed closest to the window so on nights when the moon was full, it bathed her naked back like an oil painting. She put Van Gogh to shame. I can only imagine his reaction if he saw the same thing I got to see every night. What he would have created. How he would have been inspired. Her smile was glow in the dark. Her hair was choppy and soft and always smelled good, even when she hadn’t showered in 3 days. She forgot to do that sometimes. So did I. We could go days in that shoebox, completely ignorant of the prideful sun who continued to wake and sleep without us.

I have never loved anyone like I loved her.

Our apartment was so crowded, you could hardly find a square foot of empty floor. A trip to the bathroom looked like some demented game of hopscotch. We were both too stubborn to put any of our individual possessions in storage or mail them back to our parents, so we crammed everything we owned into our tiny home. Her things became my things. My things became her things. They became our things. Her annotated copy of Catcher In the Rye fit in my hands like I had been clinging to it since the 9th grade. My red flannel fit over her small frame like it had been made for her.

She wasn’t the cuddling type. After we would make love she would smile at me with her fluorescent teeth and role over to her side of the bed, so suddenly far away from me she might as well have fallen off a cliff. Some nights I swear I could heard a thud as she hit the ground. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and feel like I was sleeping alone. I’d sit up in bed and reach my arm out for her warm back or I’d shine the light from my cellphone onto her rich brown hair. I couldn’t go back to sleep until I knew she was there. And, she always was. Always there. Always within my reach.

I loved that girl. I loved that woman.

At the peak of our relationship I don’t think there was one thing I wouldn’t do for her. I would have taken a bullet for her, I would have cut my right arm off for her, I would have moved to a 3rd world country and started my entire life over with her if she asked me to. Being with her was like being on some sort of drug. There was LSD in her eyes. Cocaine on her lips. And the way she laughed was pure black tar heroin. The entirety of our relationship was some kind of trip that I never had to come down from.

That’s a dangerous kind of love. That kind of love makes you do dangerous things.

• 5 Nov 2017
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