EVE SPEAKS

Let the man who cannot dream be a condemned man. Who comes here but shadows of ourselves, where smoke seeps into plush velvet the color of lipstick and blood. This place is my dreamweaving, its iron sculptures, framed in light. Flickering chandeliers’ fake fire. Still, wax melts and curls around my feet. The tables here are scratched brass, carved with names and regrets. You who regret, that is who you become. And you who need, but do not know why. Your need opens something in me which knows to anticipate dread. I anticipate your reprimand, and I anticipate your promise. Tell me then, as if I knew no words, tell me why you have created me to dread you.

 

Were I to assign us color, we would be mood ring, and then I would understand how heat and pressure make us glow bright crimson in our faux gold casing, how blood makes us murky aquamarine. Think of your pulse, beneath an undulating mirror of sky, think of salt crystallizing upon thighs and hands and lips, feathery seagrass tickling the soles of our feet. Even the coolest freshwater springs are momentary, dissipating. How moonless winters and sunrises can be held hostage, how nothing touches you. How this causes you to forget you are standing. How you are drowning. How you cannot feel your lungs. How the sky refuses to give its light to you. How you have forgotten how to breathe.

 

Tell me how your body sustains itself, how your rib cage is beyond bursting, how you still walk one foot in front of the next, how you count and name, count and name. How these words are still foreign sounds to you. How your skin still warms you, how your pupils still respond to movement. How you are a living shadow, a mountain echo. Tell me how you can possibly need, and how you can possibly need from me.

 

Were I to assign you color, you would be opaque, a fine slice of opal beneath the moon’s veil. Were I to touch you, you’d shatter, and crumble into jasmine-scented powder. I would gather you beneath my fingernails, dust my love lines with you. Lover, I would break you. Lover, I will break you. Let there be the veil then, embroidered with dream flowers, petals resembling moths, serpents, leaves like clouds, unnameable desires. Let me always glance at empty doorways, knowing the movements beyond these are you drawing near.

 

Let this be the natural law—Lover, I will break you and compose a symphony with your bones. Of what remains, I shall grind into dust and mix with rain. Lover, do not come near, for I see story in your broken parts. Lover, do not promise, for when you do, I come to loathe words. Lover, do not speak, for what you say is vapor.

 

So here have I become the morning, and this is why water, and why jeweled skies, and why the night, and how silver makes song. Lover, did you not know I wrote my own creation story? Did you not know we all do.