darkness in the middle of the world.

“Let’s go out and sit in the middle of the world. Come, why don’t you be with me for tonight, just until the plug is pulled on the stars and the night’s skin turns black? It shouldn’t be long, but if you want, it can feel otherwise. Come, it will be up to you.”

Facing forward, we sit in the field. Behind us is the cabin casting sheen into the open air where the windows are drawn to the night’s moans. My hands stay buried beneath the earth, grass flowering where my separate fingers create cracks, while I turn the side of my face so my eye catches our behind. It looks like a lemon is floating in mid-darkness or perhaps it is more like a sunset saturating a corner of the night. Either way, each color is contained perfectly, making sure not to fuse or bleed into the blackness. Blackness: this color our bodies have been drenched in.

The night’s texture feels thick—heavy air that pushes on your chest and makes your eyes blink back tears. But I, I feel weightless. We are saying nothing, but it sounds like voices are being stretched between, before and beyond us. Possibly people of the past trying to be heard a final time, trying to sigh the sounds of an orgasm that they’ll never forget, trying to tell us to just live.

“It’s all happening,” he says. “There is no use resisting it any longer. What will be will be. What is is something special, regardless of the specifics. I am here to make moments memorable, as memorable as they can possibly be. And what did I make sure to do tonight?”

To come sit beneath a sky you cannot reach and look at stars you cannot touch.

“No, no no. If I close my eyes, things can happen differently. I can reach the sky and I can hold the star I choose. Distanced from the world, I could feel closest to my self and the reality that is real. Close your eyes now, too. Are they closed? You promise? Okay, I made sure you came out and sat beneath this all-encompassing sky with me. I wanted you to see why it feels safe here with the sky stretched out before you—with the wish that as you fall for sleep, the sky will embrace you and hold you in. Claudelean, if you could have one wish would it be?”

My response is spontaneous, unplanned and therefore closest to my mind’s immediate truth. I would wish to live in the present moment.

I fall back on the ground, the bed of the night. He does after me. Both of us lie looking into the sky, like a mirror we stare through it, intrigued. The air sounds soothing, nothing is here, nothing is around us, just trees bending in the distance and animals kept awake. I wonder who is more artificial, nature or us, but I keep this resonating in my interior and do not question it aloud. “Everything is unreal when you see through eyes of love,” he says.

He seems to be purposefully vague and allusive, as if he has been laying out clues that I am oblivious to. I finally ask, What are you thinking about?

“Not thinking, just seeing.”

Well then, what are you seeing?

“The night’s hair is full of dandruff. Which means the day has probably not been washed away. Maybe waking dreams are unforgettable. What are you thinking?”

I feel my feelings as I think them.

“What are you feeling?”

Well, I am just not sure whether I have come along way or still have more to go. Looking around, I see there is no walls and I think how everything is escapable and how I should just run, shaking myself sober from dreams. But at the same time, I think I am sitting in the middle of the world and seeing there are no walls. I feel like the night must not be tangible or attainable and I wonder whether I am just the same. See, it is night out, my hand drops down in front of my face, and although I can feel it, I only see blackness. I feel I should fear I don’t exist.

Just as I am finishing speaking, he kisses me. His lips push into the budding of my mouth. His hands finger my body’s stem. The sky’s color palate trickles into a plush pattern, streaming tears like ribbons across the sky. And for a moment or more everything seems made certain.

I guess I exist, I say with assurance.

“Yes, but you will always seem unreal. The reality is it is within your very being to escape me. That is why I asked to have you for tonight in the middle of the world with no one else. The night whispering its falling, your hand appearing like it is holding an arrow, your ever present taste, but it is your eyes that give me all the light I shall ever need to have to know we both exist now in the middle of here. And if I always have this moment held within my memory, we can both exist in the middle of here forever."