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Caesura
by Elliott Silver (elliottsilver@yahoo.com)



The thought, like all the great ones, caught him completely unaware. Out of the blue.

The sky, just shy of cerulean. Still polychromatic with night.

Breakers against the shore, garbled poetry whose words he could only guess but whose meaning was unquestionable.

The Pacific Coast.

Undeniable in its fiery, rugged beauty.

The wind shifted, as it was prone to do when bored tormenting one needle of the compass, and blew freely through the open window.

Chill.

Made him want to snuggle deep into the quilts.

She shifted with his thoughts, as if reading them in her dreams.

Tendrils of skin and sex and warmth.

He stood at the balcony window, let the gusts wash his body instead of her mouth, billow his unbuttoned white shirt like unruly sails on a sun-silver sea.

He crossed him arms, leant against the wall, and settled in for a good stay. Kept himself at bay, afloat.

Watching.

The waves.

Her.

He didn’t know, wasn’t sure he wanted to know, what it was about her that gut-punched him through and through. What it was, more exactly, that allowed him, by some miracle, to discover something new about her every time he looked.

Which was often.

The calla lilies on the bedside table rustled like laundry on a line, petals and leaves whispering sweet secrets to the sleeping form.

Luxury.

What luxury.

A simple word, for such an undefinable, unmeasurable concept.

Not money or wealth or power, but rather the woman sleeping in the bed.

Outside, far towards the horizon, a boat skimmed, silhouette rippling the currents like a heat-induced illusion. The sky now greying, aging, as with tempest.

They had been together just over a year, now. From nefarious beginnings, came chance. As if it had been willed.

Predestined.

It had taken so much more than he would ever know to allay herself with him. He knew that. Because it had taken so much, so damn much, to simply just believe, and let herself believe, in things she had no longer deemed possible.

First, in him.

And finally, them.

All it had taken was her, the one variable in his life, to make him whole again.

Two interlocking pieces of the same puzzle, the same logarithm.

They might have taken longer, more circumspect routes, but they’d gotten where they needed to be nonetheless.

In each other’s arms.

Trust.

So cherished, like that first long kiss as they fell into each other.

A sprinkling of saffron strewn like fairy dust along the horizon’s easel, dispelling, displacing. Tufts of tinsel transfusing with the ultramarine ocean.

The thought returned, irrepressible.

Had it ever been far away?

Or had it only been unvoiceable? And if so, why?

Why now.

He had heard that some things could only be spoken of during the shimmer of night, that come dawn, they were sentenced mute. And that the things of the day were no less so, no topic during the shade of darkness.

To each their own, with no convergence.

This is it, he reflected, the wind chasing the thought free of its last moorings.

It was a crazy world.

But sometimes, those rare precious exceptions.

Night and day coalesced, a Celtic knot.

No beginnings, no ends.

In the midst of moonglow, and the spangle of sunstreams, like themselves.

Puzzle pieces could exist on their own, no doubt. But together, there was the whole picture.

This is it.

What all dream of, and come to believe does not exist.

The sun, muraled into the land.

This is it.

The ocean, blanketing and sloughing granite.

He, tossed at sea, a skein, a message in a bottle only she could read, decipher.

Unravel, as he did her.

He went to her.

Slipped into bed.

Close.

His lips brushing the cape of her shoulder.

She rolled over and into him, her eyes pacific.

What men had sailed around the globe to find.

"Marry me."

The swell of surf and tides deep.

Night, day, eternity.

As long as they had.

Eyes as blue as the dawn outside, as the day sweeping over the land, as the vortex of waves under the beck of the moon.

Silence.

Caesura.

Her answer, like all the great ones, caught him unaware.











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