My Half of Your Horizon

         The damp warmth of our skin against skin left me smoldering, a bed of embers glowing slowly beneath a quiet fire. The air coming in across the dunes had upon it the first whispers of winter waiting in the wings; our drying skin prickled with goosebumps, my hair – several inches longer and a good shade lighter – dried enough to drift just past my eyes. You were quick to set it right, letting your palm settle against my check, then slide with a gentle sense of a lost summer's reverence...down the length of my neck to rest above a timid heart that leapt beneath the chill-pocked, freckled spanse of a chest still downy with youth.

         I was leaving in the morning, already a day late in returning, and for the first time the night was impatient, even cruel, as the moon moved too quickly behind a thin layer of clouds. Our stars were up there somewhere, but we abandoned our hopes of seeing them again as the east gave way to each lighter shade of the morning set to come.

         You stood behind me, still and silent, with your arms clutched tight around my chest and abdomen, resting your cheek against my ear. Without breaking the embrace, I wove my fingers between yours, and we stood watching the sunrise at the end of the boardwalk. I can't say why we spent my last morning there as opposed to lying on our bare skin in the sand...the water had grown too cold, but we each had warmth to spare. Or why we didn't spend the morning passing sly grins beneath the covers as we ignored the rest of the world entirely. Sunrise, after all, was still ours...

         Due to our off-season timeshares, we'd become at least familiar strangers by that third day when you walked barefoot through the fast-retreating remnants of a high-tide at dawn. Your jeans were saturated, cuffed just under the knee. You carried a pair of Umbro flops loose in one hand. The rest of you was bare and beautiful.

         Fair skinned, but not pale. A short crop of hay-spun hair caught the early morning light like a coastal watchtower of ancient times, when fire was all that kept one safe upon the water – fire as warnings upon the shore, and those eternal fires burning above...so many seafaring souls, guided by nothing but the sun and stars.

         I saw you for some reason as a solitary Viking, at war, of course, with something (most likely yourself), all six-feet, three inches tall and chiseled from an ivory tower of marble or alabaster. But that morning, your bare feet turned in my direction. You were as generous with your company as my eyes with their attention.

         “May I sit?”

         I suddenly looked from side to side as if a retinue of your choosing had gathered as you spoke those three simple words. Your accent was subtle, clearly refined, and yet I still maintain you embellished it just enough on my behalf despite your transparent objections.

         Out of both terror and courtesy I blushed with an adolescent's severity. One could've effortlessly camouflaged me in the deep red of the morning sky that rode reflected within the glassy troughs between each wave. You enjoyed it – but to be honest, so did I. To be comfortably awkward is rare enough, but to share that loss for words to the soundtrack of tumbling surf and the chatter of gulls is a moment you burn like a brand into the tender walls of your youthfully transient memory.

         When the moment finally passed you simply grinned, settling onto the wind-worried sand in a lithe, fluid motion. As a child in Denmark you'd been the young gymnast to watch. Then you grew a little (and then a lot), and as if violating the socio-athletic contract by doing so, the focus shifted to another, shorter, Danish Adonis with a similar affinity for crippling aerial catastrophes. We spoke of this, often through laughter, for the duration of my first dawn in Viking territory.

         We shared the world's crimson tinged edge that morning – sun and sea alike – and yet part of me had given it to you as the only gift I could offer, a gift befitting the friendship in the days to come, or the mutual appreciation of so many shared sunsets, or the moonlight...always that...reflected in a thousand myriad facets as the mist came in to coalesce upon your skin.

         There had never been a mirror that left me fonder of who I was upon stepping away. But if you meant it when our eyes met in the starlit dim of a new moon, when you leaned close and said 'I love you' for the first and only time...if you meant it then, even once, then I will never be more proud to be me.

         I understand now why you could only gather the courage to say it once, and why you felt the need to lean in when you did. Over the years, love becomes another language both spoken and of the body. One becomes familiar with the long list of reasons – no matter how openly expressed – as to why the actual language itself is withheld. I'm just glad I didn't know why at the time.

         I gave you the entire horizon that first morning. All that could have been between us and that distant unknown was yours. Yet finally, you said it, and regardless of what happened then or happens now and later, you gave me a horizon of my own – one that I, for once, could look upon without all the questions of self that unfailingly make the here and now seem safer than any journey across that divide could ever be...

955wc