Strange things have been known by man. Stranger things yet have been known by women and the strangest things of all have been known by both, and everyone in between. Because that’s the nature of dreams, that’s the reality of nature, that’s the dream like quality of being alive, here and now and so **** material and intangible that it deserves a post doctoral thesis or dozen.

So that’s what the pattern of moonlight looks like over your thighs.

Now, we’re too old to hypothesise but young enough to ponder, not naïve but not yet jaded. It’s the best way to be, like lucid hallucination. It’s a feeling too clothonic for the modern age but not something that would fit anywhere else. Something belonging to the earth and desperate to return to it, desperate to drag me with it, with you, up or down.

I’ll swim or drown any which way life will have me, and anyone who knows me at all knows this.

You have a way of getting under my finger nails. I pick and pry but can’t clean myself of you, just seem to spread you around and over me like your tongue or your eyes. I never planned for this, but,

Sometimes love must be ad lib.

Kind of like us, don’t you think? Mirrored bodies caged by a mosquito net, trapped, entrapped, embraced. Moonlight over your thighs, across my back, pattering over my spine along with the sweat. Moss stained ruins and craning palm trees and monsoon season in our minds and outside them.

But maybe it isn’t like this at all.

Maybe it started because it was cold, so deathly cold, like a terse comment or the gaze sought for and purposefully kept away. Like the last ice cube from a ****** mojito in a faux Hawaiian bar crunched between your stellar teeth. Maybe it happens in a cabin in Siberia battered by fast and fat snowflakes and a howl of a wind. Not because of us, no, we are only pushed together by the elements. Feelings don’t come into it at all. Apart from the ones we ignore, and push away as virulently as we banish the frost on each other’s skin in our caressing and rubbing and trying to forget it all later.

Because even if there is no such thing as ghosts we still keep them inside us. In love, hate, in longing.

To never forget is to make your own ghosts. Spirit equals life knowing it will end and seizing it regardless, laughing all the while.

So we give birth to each other’s ghosts, and lie with them, the respectable beds we made are now burnt to cinders and scattered on trade winds.

Even the things we dream and invent in our imaginations are true in their own way, because they are all based on and born out of things that are material, things that are tangible, even in the waking world.

I can see your worries written in your collarbone. Let me lick them out.

Like I did in dry desert heat, when we were parched and our tongues scratched like sandpaper against the corners of each other’s mouths. The sand was everywhere, in your eyes and my shoes and it shifted inside us as we moved. Maybe that’s how it started. It’s a struggle to remember.

I remember you crying for no reason, your back to me, face mirrored in a cracked window.

The point, the fact that can save, is that love can be made out of misery. That everything can change even by nothing changing. This is true even if it isn’t right, I’m certain of it.

But certainty is rare as rocking horse **** around here, so we take what we can get.

And we got it, didn’t we? In the curve of a Renaissance painting we saw each other, but you are no painting that I could stop myself from touching. You don’t belong on a wall, you don’t belong to paying visitors and school groups and snooty experts who would pick you apart. If they did, if anyone did, I would tear them to shreds and spend the rest of my life recovering your pieces; from museum floors, from photographs, from other people’s memories.

But it’s funny how people always look best when walking away from you. That or people you’ve never met. Those are the most beautiful and perfect people, the ones that don’t exist except in your imagination.

But aren’t we all to an extent imaginary? Or at least imagined, by ourselves, by others. We become new from day to night to daydream, influenced by our past but not the same. Like Play-Doh, a square can become a circle and then a square again, but it will not be the same square as before.

So I remember you like I’m waiting, not regretting but always reminiscing, always missing.

I don’t know if it’s less painful this way, but at least it’s a feeling of something.