Because I cannot now love you body to body I will try to love you in words. Hand to eye, my fingers playing lightly across your closed eyes, tongue to ear. Can you still hear my voice there? Sliding across the screens we dreamt we'd make our different dreams live on, I pause and feel the depth of the screen that keeps my body here and yours there. When we made our plans, the screen was flat. But you went right through yours (I saw you leach under the silver light) and now all my computer screens, smoke screens, are open orifices and I am like Alice again falling through.
You used to say girls didn't understand the allure of holes. You were sometimes wrong.
We know something about slipping in and out of cells, animate and still. Like Gretel I want to map my trip into the dense forest of you, dropping these words so I can get back out. But I've read her story (so many stories now) and you taught me fairy tales are forced to be tragedies to keep us from wanting to be fairies. Words and pictures, smoke and scotch, me and you, here and there, then and now, how I want to be with you still, frame by frame, hand over hand, word by word. Burrowing in the hole you thought I was blind to, sliding out, I now know that the architecture of the screen that holds our bodies is never ever flat. Take one.
