So I Did

We held hands in the dark, and I couldn’t even see you.

I thought, how odd, that the flash of lightning that just occurred didn’t cause an explosion of light. We walked along the dark streets, and the trees rustled softly, and the moon was high and bright, and the sky full of stars.

There were candles lit in every house, so that you could see little glimmers coming through closed windows, but the light was too dim to reach the streets if you were right in the middle. The traffic lights were not flickering, and everyone was too afraid to drive.

It was the biggest blackout that had every hit the city, and you could hear families in their backyards showing young children the constellations as the sky opened up with our eyes and they could see things they had never seen before.

You came to my house with a flashlight in your hand, walked all the way there and knocked on my door and said “come on, I have to show you something.”

We took the seventeen flights of stairs in the dark, stopping at every level to press against each other in the complete blackness. It was almost like our bodies didn’t even exist anymore, and we were nothing but a cluster of feeling cells, nothing but insides housed in a communal shroud of complete blackness. Everything was quiet.

The restaurants were all closed, the busses were not running. The heat of the summer had driven everyone outside, phones were left at home to preserve battery life. You took me to your old street, where we climbed onto your old roof and looked out at the new city that had been thrust into darkness. There were no flashing lights, there was nothing.

There was wind and it blew through my hair with the smell of August turning into September and you held me again and said “let me be everything.” You said that even in the dark you could see my eyes, that they glowed in the dark, and you kissed each of them.

The lightning, there it was again. It flashed behind my eyes and it held onto my throat, it grabbed onto my skin. There were voices shouting out below, laughing and clinking wine glasses on some front porch near this old roof, and the wind blew through my hair and my face and I swear I could feel it say “give in.”

So I did. 

unsplash-logoRicardo Gomez AngelBrilliant